Moderation

Moderate comments in Wagtail

Choose a policy

Policy	Behavior after guest email proof
Review all	Queue every new message
Review guests	Queue guests; normally publish registered authors
Publish immediately	Publish eligible submissions without routine review
Apply rules	Review/reject matches; normally publish unmatched text

Suspicious guest signals can still require review. Rule rejection wins when Apply rules is active. Phrase rules are not applied by the other policies. Guest confirmation always precedes moderation. Changing policy leaves old queued messages in their current state.

Queue and decisions

Open Comments, choose Site/status and filter by search, date or Page. Counts respect permitted Sites and active filters. Open a message to see its author, state, text, action journal and any pending author revision.

Action	Effect
Approve	Publish a pending comment or approve its author revision
Reject	Keep content private; optional reason is author-only
Hide	Reversibly hide published content
Restore	Restore hidden content
Erase text	Permanently remove text, retaining replies and a deleted placeholder

Moderators cannot change another author's text or propose replacement text. Bulk decisions apply to pending comments; author revisions are decided individually. Pending revisions keep the old published text visible. Closing a discussion does not remove its moderation queue. Logs record actions without copies of comment text.

Group permissions by Site

The standard Wagtail group create/edit form includes Comment permissions by site. Users also need Wagtail admin access. Capabilities are View, Moderate, Hide/restore, Delete text, Settings and Rules. Moderate permits retrying eligible failed mail. Normal Page-edit rights are additionally required to configure a Page.

Rules are shared project-wide: granting Rules through a Site row permits management of the common list affecting every Site using Apply rules. Grant it deliberately. There are no per-Page moderator grants. The separate group-access editor inside Comments is superuser-only; ordinary group forms use Wagtail's group permissions. Direct action URLs enforce the same boundaries as the visible buttons.

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