Captains

What is a Captain?

Below is a letter to all captains that answers this question: 

Captains play an important role in safeguarding the health of our community. Below are some moderation guidelines to help you in this role.

1. First of all, captains should strive to maintain a positive and constructive attitude, especially when interacting with the community. Captains hold privileges and power, which comes with a higher level of responsibility to cultivate a positive and welcoming community. Captains should not spread negativity about the platform openly. If you disagree with the platform, you can offer constructive criticism through email or the modding Discord server.
2. As a captain, you should be familiar with the rules and guidelines for all users. Before you moderate others, you can perform self moderation in your post history. Set an example in your posts.
3. Be helpful to other users in the community. Captains are often seen as the person to turn to when users run into a problem in the community, and captains' activities are always seen in the Help board (Help: How to, Help: Ask Mod, Help: Add This Profile) or their affiliated boards. Please try your best to avoid conflict of interests in moderation and never attack your member, for example, if a user you or your close friend are debating with violated a rule or a guideline, flag a report and leave it to other mods.
4. You have been recognized and trusted by the community and fellow moderators. I hope you will carry on the trustworthy team spirit. If you disagree with another moderator, feel free to talk with the mod directly (remember, be nice) or me.
5. Be active and engaged. It's a volunteer job, so there aren't any tough requirements as long as you can regularly monitoring and addressing content. You can take breaks, but please make sure your co-captain(s) can cover for you. If you go dark for more than a week or deactivate your account without informing the admin, it might be the end of it.
6. To stay out of controversy, with the Captain role, you are not allowed to advertise any kind of content or product without admin's approval. This includes but is not limited to: discord invite links, referral links, social media profiles or channels. This rule applies to all users as well.

Captain's roles and responsibilities include:

1. Set a vision for the board: set the icon, description, and rules, organize events, etc. Rules that board captain can select to add can be found here under "Discussion Board Rules". 
2. Moderate content reported by users - captains who are minors will not moderate content.  

   • When removing or relocating a post or a reply, captains need to specify which rule this content violates. Each rule has a weight and effect on automoderation. For example, a user violating No Ban Evasion rule will be permanently restricted, a user violating No Illegal Content rule will be muted for 1 day and receive 5 demerit points. Upon receiving 10 points, a user will be permanently restricted from a board. Please see Automoderation section below.

3. Approve join requests (only applies to a few boards, eg. AIUG, Fun Board, Unpopular Opinions, etc.)
4. Manually restrict a user.
5. Pin posts

General requirements for the Captain role include:

1. (to moderate community reports) Be above the age of 17. 

2. Be familiar with PDB rules and guidelines. 

3. Support the platform's policies, but are welcome to respectfully discuss any areas of disagreement through email.

4. Be a helpful member of their affiliate board or PDB in general.

5. Be a loyal PDB member and have made significant contribution to the site.

6. Have no existing or more than 2 prior warnings/restrictions.

Audit log 

Captain's moderation activities can be found in the audit log, which is placed at the end of board information. For example the audit log of PDB Community can be found here. You have to be a member of a board to check its audit log. 

You can find on the audit log:

• Icon, description, and rule changes.
• Content removed and relocated.
• Member joined, left, and restricted.

Automoderation

A demerit point system is adopted in discussion board automoderation. Members will be permanently restricted restricted for 1 week from a board after accumulating 10 (15/20/25/30/...) panelty points or more from the board.