Honest question, does this forum have any moderators? And if there are staff members, do they actually know this forum exists? I’m not asking this sarcastically, I’m genuinely curious.
I’ve read quite a few posts, and there doesn’t seem to be much moderation or official support, just users helping other users.
No. We killed them all.
One moderator in the traditional sense and two Bambu staff members who drop by from time to time to provide sometimes support and/or make announcements.
https://forum.bambulab.com/g/moderators
Then there’s “regular” - which really just means that the user is “regular posting”, and how this status is determined is something of a mystery. However, it has less to do with moderating.
Oh, I hadn’t noticed that link before.
Poor Gavin, reading 13k posts in just 19 days sounds exhausting lol. Hopefully he’s some kind of cousin of Claude or something.
Now hey, don’t blame me for that. It was all you guys. I had nothing to do with it.
Don’t act innocent. Even if you didn’t pull the trigger, you loaded the bullets. You can’t back out now, we have gone too far.
I asked the exact same question when I first joined.
It’s “self-policing” which is why controversial threads seem to devolve quickly with the same 3-4 people bashing each other. With one or two individuals being “self-proclaimed” gate-keepers. That said, it’s a lot more civilized than Reddit and less noisy than Discord.
There is a decent amount of moderation that happens behind the scenes. This isn’t often evident to most users and really shouldn’t be if done correctly. Keeping the forum clean and relatively organized requires a couple of hours a day. A good chunk of time is dealing with spam bots and user flags.
I can say as a pretty “regular” visitor I see next to zero spambot activity and overall this is one of the best modded forums I’ve been a part of. Thanks for making it what it is!
Bruh, you are the ammo guy.
Most dangerous thing I have is a 3d printed Boomerang (and it’s so hard to aim with it).
Hold on bucco. Less than 50 percent of my stuff is ammo related. I dont need that title.
Evidently this is the most dangerous thing I have printed.
You should’ve made an AI Dragon Ball action figure that clips onto the seat belt buckle and called it a "Super sayan belt buckle improver”. 100% chance trending 0% penalty. 
The heavy lifting for moderation on Discourse is by the participants based on Trust Levels. You can read about them here https://blog.discourse.org/2018/06/understanding-discourse-trust-levels/
I think it actually works pretty well. New users are limited in what they can do and how much they can do. Users with more history are allowed to do more and more frequently.
There are moderators and they do occasionally comment or take action, but the need for that seems rare.
However, the trust level doesn’t give you any advantages in this forum, or it’s set differently.
I was already at Level 3, but after taking a break, I dropped back down to Level 2. However, that’s not the point: the thing is that Level 3 doesn’t have any moderation capabilities, except that spam flags are handled more aggressively, but the final decision still belongs to Level 4 - the moderators.
I don’t see it that way, since you reach Level 1 immediately after agreeing to the rules. It’s good that users can post pictures, but how are they limited?
On the other hand, a Level 3 user can’t really do much more than a Level 1 user.
I just want to point out that the page you linked to shows the default settings for the software and the forum; that doesn’t mean those settings have been applied to this forum. So this isn’t meant to contradict your comment, but just to add to it.
Or to put it simply: Basically, everyone has the same rights from Level 1 to 3; only Level 4 users can act as moderators. So the “Regular” status is mostly just a label to show that the user is actually regular online.
A while back, they were even looking for moderators here - if I remember correctly, though it must have been at least a year ago.
Of course, it’s possible that there are “hidden” moderators - no question about it - but otherwise there have always been two who appeared publicly, and now there’s only one: JayRaymond.
But JayRaymond is welcome to correct me if I’m wrong. 
I’ll post this separately: Here’s a second link, which is different from the first one I posted, where we can also take a look. The first link was to the group’s listing, and here we can see the list of badges.
We can also see the current number below the text – it’s very small. Four members have reached and still holding level 4. Note the “and”; both conditions must be met.
It promoted me to “Regular”, so it can’t be that good 
Me too - it keeps disappearing and then reappearing, and then disappearing again. I think you really have to post every day or spend half your life on the forum. Whether that’s good or bad is up to each person to decide. 
As for moderation, there is. This forum is more tolerant of “heated” interactions. Maybe that’s what you referred to.
As for official support, the forum is for interactions among users, not for official support of any kind. Sending in a ticket is the way to go to get official assistance.
Maybe “moderation” wasn’t the right word… as JonRaymond mentioned, it’s something that happens behind the scenes, and when it comes to spam and similar issues, it’s true that I haven’t really seen any problems on the forum.
I didn’t mention it in the post, but while writing it I had in mind some recurring and more controversial topics (like AI on MakerWorld).
I haven’t seen much official communication around these issues. There are guidelines forMakerWorld Exclusive models, but from a user’s perspective, they sometimes feel more like recommendations than rules that are actively enforced.
I might also mention in this context there is a set of community guidelines for the forum. It may not be super obvious as it’s buried in the “About” tab.
https://forum.bambulab.com/guidelines
Civil discussion of topics are encouraged within these guidelines.
