Volunteer moderators

Members report profiles, messages, bunches and activities. Those reports land in a queue with the reported content attached, and a moderator reads them and decides: action it, dismiss it, or leave it open for someone else.

You will see unpleasant things. Harassment, scam attempts, and private messages that somebody reported. You see the message because you cannot judge a report without it. Most of the queue is dull, some of it is grim, and we would rather you knew which before you volunteered than after.

Realistically this is a few minutes a day at our current size, and it is the kind of work where two people checking in most days beats one person doing a marathon on Sundays.

It is unpaid. Bunchy has no revenue, no investors and no runway; there is no budget this comes out of. If that is a dealbreaker, and it may well be, you should stop reading here. That is a completely reasonable position and we would rather hear it now.

We are not going to offer equity, back pay, a rate “once we grow”, or any other number we cannot stand behind today. A promise made now to a volunteer is a debt they will remember and we might not honour.

What we will write down, publicly, so it can be held against us: if Bunchy ever earns money, paying the people who kept it safe is the first thing that money should do, before features, before marketing, before anyone takes a salary out of it. That is our intention and it is on a public page for a reason. It is not a contract, and you should treat the difference seriously.

If we ever do start paying moderators, we will say so here and write to everyone on this list first.

A Staff badge on your profile, so members can tell a real moderator from someone claiming to be one. A say in the rules: the people working the queue see what actually goes wrong long before anyone else does, and the moderation rules should follow them. And a direct line to whoever is running this, which at the moment is one person.

No minimum hours, no rota, no streaks, and nothing that counts how often you show up.

You are 18 or older. Bunchy itself is 16+, and this bar is higher on purpose: the queue contains reported harassment and private messages, and that is not something to hand a sixteen-year-old as a favour.

You have been here long enough to know how the place works. You treat what you see in the queue as private, reading a reported message is not permission to repeat it, screenshot it or mention who sent it. And you tell us when a report involves someone you know, so it can go to somebody else.

Write one line to hello@bunchy.app and you are done, the same day, with no notice period and no explanation owed. Unpaid work you cannot walk away from is not volunteering.

If the queue is getting to you, say so and stop. That is a normal thing to happen to moderators and it is not a failure. We would rather lose a volunteer than grind one down.

Moderators work reports, act on content, and can suspend an account for a day, a month, or indefinitely. That is real power over somebody else’s week, and it is deliberate: the person reading the report at midnight should be able to stop what is happening without waiting for anyone.

They cannot ban an account, change anybody’s role, or take the site offline. Those are permanent or platform-wide, so they need an admin, and admin is a separate decision.

Moderators cannot see your email address. Account search shows it to admins only, and it is withheld before it ever leaves our server rather than merely hidden on the page. Nobody can see your password, at any level: only a hash of it is ever stored.

Every staff action is written to an audit trail before it takes effect, including ours. That is not distrust of you; it is what makes the power reviewable, and it protects a moderator who made a defensible call as much as it catches one who did not.

You need an account to apply, because a moderator has to be somebody with a history here rather than an address we have never seen.

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