Unmoderation/soft moderation - Standards

Daniel Gultsch

1 Apr 1 Apr

5:23 a.m.

On Wed, Apr 1, 2026 at 2:01 PM Matthew Wild <mwild1(a)gmail.com> wrote:

I'm curious if anyone has thoughts on being able to undo a XEP-0425 moderation action. The use cases I have in mind are: - admin accidentally moderated the wrong message - one admin moderates a message, but after consideration/discussion with other admins, it is decided it shouldn't have been moderated - reverting automated moderation after human review This last point is the one that sparked this email, however I have experienced the other cases as well over the past couple of years. For the automated case, all I necessarily want is for clients to hide (by default) messages in a group chat which are likely to be spam, for example if some trusted but non-admin users have reported it. When an admin does respond, they could then moderate the message fully, or unhide it (if the report was incorrect, e.g. malicious). This hiding/unhiding could be a new XEP, or we could solve "unmoderation", which solves the other use cases and probably makes the most sense.

I sort of get your last use case with regards to reverting automated moderation. I’m terrified of all the extra UI I have to built around this. This basically means I have to build a moderation control center into my app. I get that for a full fledged discord replacement / large community chat platform we will need something like that. But if this is our goal then there are so many other things that need to be implemented first. cheers Daniel

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Philipp Hörist

6:06 a.m.

Hi, Please also consider to expose the undo timeframe in disco. Otherwise i see no big problem, in Gajim the implementation is already that moderation is just a flag on the message. The flag tells the GUI how to draw the message. On server side I would expect you could do the same. I would assume a tombstone would only be set of the message is out of the undo timeframe. I would expect that a server can announce with the undo timeframe, if moderation is soft. Regard Philipp On Wed, Apr 1, 2026, at 14:42, Matthew Wild wrote:

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On Wed, 1 Apr 2026 at 13:24, Daniel Gultsch <daniel(a)gultsch.de> wrote:

I sort of get your last use case with regards to reverting automated moderation. I’m terrified of all the extra UI I have to built around this. This basically means I have to build a moderation control center into my app. I get that for a full fledged discord replacement / large community chat platform we will need something like that. But if this is our goal then there are so many other things that need to be implemented first.

I understand your concerns, but rest assured I'm aiming for something that doesn't require that level of UI (but doesn't forbid it either - as someone involved as owner/admin of many public channels, I'd be happy for a dedicated "moderation panel" client I could use,and I did start work on such a thing a few years ago). Protocol and implementation aside, showing "Undo moderation" on a moderated message seems like a natural thing that should exist, regardless of anything else. The difficulty is that in some cases permanent moderation is desired, such as when removing illegal content. I don't think the protocol for this should be too hard for the client, and the UI is just a menu item (which would replace the 'Moderate' menu item, if that's how it's implemented). If undo functionality exists, the automation is entirely server side, and shouldn't require anything extra on the clients. Regards, Matthew _______________________________________________ Standards mailing list -- standards(a)xmpp.org To unsubscribe send an email to standards-leave(a)xmpp.org

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Marvin W.

17 Apr 17 Apr

2:26 a.m.

Just wanted to point out that there is prior art to this concept: GitHub has the ability to hide/unhide issue comments instead of fully removing them. Further, for hidden messages, a reason can be stated. The typical user interface is to show that there was a message, but display it as hidden with a reason and allow the user to show it nonetheless. There's also clearly the usecase of permanently soft-moderating messages: I have used the GitHub feature to hide messages that complain or ping me about spam messages: Deleting those feels wrong, but also they don't add anything to the actual conversation, so for most it's reasonable to have them hidden. Especially with the possibility to state the reason, that's also not perceived negatively (GitHub has a reason "Resolved"). Marvin On Wed, 2026-04-01 at 12:59 +0100, Matthew Wild wrote:

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Hi folks, I'm curious if anyone has thoughts on being able to undo a XEP-0425 moderation action. The use cases I have in mind are: - admin accidentally moderated the wrong message - one admin moderates a message, but after consideration/discussion with other admins, it is decided it shouldn't have been moderated - reverting automated moderation after human review This last point is the one that sparked this email, however I have experienced the other cases as well over the past couple of years. For the automated case, all I necessarily want is for clients to hide (by default) messages in a group chat which are likely to be spam, for example if some trusted but non-admin users have reported it. When an admin does respond, they could then moderate the message fully, or unhide it (if the report was incorrect, e.g. malicious). This hiding/unhiding could be a new XEP, or we could solve "unmoderation", which solves the other use cases and probably makes the most sense. Thoughts? Regards, Matthew _______________________________________________ Standards mailing list -- standards(a)xmpp.org To unsubscribe send an email to standards-leave(a)xmpp.org

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