Moderator

A moderator is a forum user who watches over the forums. Moderators exist in forums (or chat rooms, or any group) all over the internet. The main NaNoWriMo forums were unmoderated for the first several years of their existence. During the 2004 NaNoWriMo season Cybele May joined the staff to moderate the forums. Heather Dudley replaced her in January 2008 when Cybele stepped down to work on other site features.

Heather is assisted by a team of volunteer moderators throughout the forums. The regional lounges are moderated by the Municipal Liaisons of that region, who can perform duties such as pinning and moving posts. Moderator volunteers are generally (but not always) pulled from the Municipal Liaison pool, although former MLs may continue their moderator duties after stepping down from managing their regions. In 2018, moderator applications were open to the larger Wrimo population for the first time, without any previous ML experience required.

Due to Discourse's forum-specific moderator functionality, all moderators are now global moderators as of the NaNoWriMo 2019 season. There are fewer moderators since all moderators can take action on all moderation requests. This will remain the case until Discourse introduces expanded features for forum-specific moderation.

NaNoWriMo Moderators

Present

• Heather Dudley, Lead Forums Moderator (January 2008-present)
• Rob Diaz, YWP Forums Moderator (2012-present)
• Angel (July 2023-present)
• B_C_Trank (July 2023-present)
• Cyndi_Maher (July 2023-present)
• Jendora (July 2023-present)
• Lauren E. Mitchell (August 2019-present)
• Xander Writes (August 2019-present)

Past

• CinnamonFridge (August 2019-June 2023)
• Dichotomy6958 (October 2019-March 2023)
• Elyndra (October 2019-?)
• goloptious (October 2019-March 2023)
• Jubilee Nelson (March 2020-August 2021)
• Samma Jaye (October 2019-December 2020)
• WitchyRobyn (October 2019-March 2023)

Many of the non-staff global moderators previously moderated individual forums. For a list of past moderators, view the list in the individual NaNoWriMo forum.

Some responsiblities of NaNoWriMo forum moderators

• Answer questions from users.
• Manage spam.
• Read discussions and make sure users are behaving. Remind users of the Codes of Conduct if discussions get heated.
• Resolve posts that have been flagged.
• Monitor profile images.
• Move threads that were posted in the wrong forum.
• Ban users who repeatedly break the rules. (Generally reserved for the lead forum moderator.)
• Lock threads that violate the Codes of Conduct.
• Sticky popular and informational threads.
• (in previous versions of the forum) Monitor signatures and images for appropriateness.