A moderator (from Latin moderor — to moderate, restrain) is a user of an online resource (a forum, chat, echoconference, or online game) granted rights broader than an ordinary participant's but narrower than an administrator's; as a rule, responsible for enforcing the rules in specific sections or topics of the resource.[1]
Powers
A moderator's extended rights may include: deleting other users' messages, editing them, trimming or hiding individual parts, deleting user pages, and restricting the rights of other participants — up to and including blocking (colloquially, a "ban").[1]
History: Fidonet moderators
Moderators played a special role in the history of Fidonet, the global self-governing computer network. There, moderators were what echoconference supervisors were called, keeping order as early cyberculture took shape. Since Fidonet operated without a single administrative center, elected moderators at various levels were essential to the normal functioning of its venues; over the network's years of development they worked out elaborate international rules of self-governance.[1] In the Nizhny Novgorod Fidonet, as in other regional nodes of the network, a moderator (English: Moderator) was defined as the person who checked compliance with the rules of a given echoconference.
Nizhny Novgorod context
In Nizhny Novgorod internet projects, the position of moderator is documented from the earliest years of the Russian-language web. In particular, the editorial staff of the site IslamNN — a resource on the Islamic culture of Nizhny Novgorod Region — listed Gervase Oksana Vyacheslavovna and Panshin Alexander Alekseevich as moderators. At Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day 2011, held at the Kremlin in the Arsenal building, the event's moderators took part in the festival's informal program.
Sources
- Wikipedia (ru) — Moderator (archived)