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Polkadot Moderation Team Bounty Top-up
This bounty proposal aims to continue incentivizing Polkadot Moderators for their round-the-clock contribution and support to the communities.
The Community Moderators provide a dedicated daily service, actively monitoring new member joinings to ensure the community is protected from fraudsters. They guide users with first-line direction and support while promptly identifying and regulating or banning obvious scammers to maintain a safe environment for all.
The bounty has undergone some revisions, based on feedback from the community, including a reduction in size to 8 mods covering Telegram, Discord, Reddit, Element, and the Polkadot forum. More info regarding changes to the Bounty can be found on the Proposal document
This proposal requests a one-year top-up of $167,520 (82,118 DOT at EMA-7 of $2.04/DOT)
to continue funding the Community Moderators from February 2026 to January 2027
Details of the proposal, including changes since the last top-up, analytics of servers and channels under our moderation umbrella, etc., can be found in the Proposal document
We look forward to your participation and input.
Comments (4)
Requested
Proposal Passed
Could you clarify why a team of eight paid moderators is currently required? It would be helpful to see concrete KPIs (active users, messages per day, incidents handled, response times, etc.) I’ve personally been active on the Discord over the past days and observed very low activity, which makes it hard to understand the need for such a large team. Based on this, I genuinely believe the team size could be reduced.
Also:
The forum is primarily asynchronous and discussion-based, and likely does not require the same level of ongoing, paid moderation as live chat platforms
Reddit functions more as an external information and visibility channel, and could probably be handled with minimal moderation
Element appears to have very limited community traction and is a strong candidate to be deprioritized
Telegram seems largely duplicative of Discord and could likely be reduced to a broadcast-only channel
@4bksm The bounty is not just for discord but also telegram, element, reddit and the polkadot forum. Also non of us is available full time and we need to be available in different timeslots.
Note that a lot of work you don't see as a large part of the job of moderating is monitoring the join log and protect server against spammers/scammers and raids. As long we do our job right people don't notice any of this but we pro actively remove multiple scammers/spammers daily before they even have a chance to do harm.
As outlined in the previous proposal, https://polkadot.subsquare.io/referenda/1698 this bounty was closed, among other reasons, due to poor diligence by its members and the fact that payments were made to moderators like Paradox, pastaman and Tim Janssen who were inactive. These issues were clearly identified and played a decisive role in the closure of the bounty.
@13Vg...fwXX People that were inactive received a pay cut in the months they weren't active. I can however guarantee you that Pasta and myself are very active but it isn't always visible. I monitor the join log frequently and check everyone who joins carefully and ban scammers/spammers daily.