Roles & Permissions

There are two kinds of roles on Skillboards: the role you hold on a specific board, and - for a very small number of trusted people - a site-wide role. Almost everything below is about board roles, since that's what shapes your day-to-day experience.

Board roles

Your role is scoped to a single Skillboard. You might be a Moderator on the boards you helped build and just a Member everywhere else - that's normal.

Member

Everyone starts here when they join a board.

• View, post, and comment in the board's forums
• Vote and boost content you like
• Submit new Progress Cards for review
• Use the Progress Tracker to manage your own learning

Cardinal

A trusted-member tier that board Admins can grant to active, helpful members.

• Everything a Member can do
• Your votes and boosts carry a bit more weight
• Can help draft community Pathways (guided sequences of Progress Cards) for moderators/admins to review

Cardinal isn't automatic - it's a judgment call by the board's Admins, usually based on being a positive, consistent presence in the community.

Moderator

Keeps a board's content and community healthy.

• Everything a Cardinal can do
• Review, approve, or reject Progress Card submissions
• Moderate forum posts and comments (pin, remove, clear flags)
• Handle user reports and issue warnings or temporary sanctions
• Manage board categories and edit the board's Help page
• Review edit requests and restore older versions of a Progress Card

A handful of the most senior Moderators on each board (the ones who've held the role longest) can also promote a Member to Moderator, or step a Moderator back down to Member - without needing full Admin access. This lets long-standing, trusted moderators share some of that responsibility without handing over the keys to the whole board.

Moderator access isn't necessarily permanent - boards periodically review who still needs it.

Admin

Full ownership of a board. Usually the person (or people) who created it, or someone they've promoted.

• Everything a Moderator can do
• Promote or demote anyone on the board, including other Moderators and Admins
• Remove members from the board
• Edit core board settings: name, tagline, description, and public/private visibility
• Upload the board's banner image
• Delete the board entirely

Every board always has at least one Admin - the system won't let the last Admin demote or remove themselves, to make sure a board never ends up with nobody in charge.

Site-wide role: Super Admin

Super Admin is a small, platform-level trust tier for Skillboards staff, not something granted through the app. A Super Admin effectively has Admin-level access on every board - this is intentional, so the team can step in for safety, integrity, or support reasons wherever needed, not because they personally run your community.

If you ever see admin controls on a board you didn't create and don't otherwise help run, this is almost always why.

Bans and suspensions

Moderators and Admins can sanction (warn, suspend, or ban) a member - but only on that specific board. A ban on one Skillboard has no effect on any other board you're part of.

Reporting content

Any Member can flag a forum post, comment, or Progress Card submission that breaks a board's rules. Reported content goes into that board's moderation queue, where a Moderator or Admin reviews it and decides whether to remove it, warn the poster, or take no action. If something needs attention platform-wide rather than on a single board, use Contact instead.

Questions?

If you're unsure why you can or can't do something on a board, the fastest path is asking that board's moderators or admins - role changes and their reasons are recorded, so they can tell you exactly when and why something changed. For platform-wide concerns, see Contact.