Moderation

Enzyme provides workspace-level moderation tools for managing disruptive behavior and giving users control over their experience. This guide covers banning, blocking, message pinning, and the audit log.

See Permissions & Roles for the permission matrix.

Banning #

Workspace owners and admins can ban users from a workspace. Banning immediately removes the user's membership, disconnects their active sessions, and prevents them from rejoining via invite links.

What happens when a user is banned #

1. Their workspace membership is removed.
2. Their channel memberships are removed (except DM channels — the other participant retains access to conversation history).
3. Their active SSE connections are terminated.
4. They cannot accept new invite links for that workspace.

Unbanning removes the ban record but does not restore the user's membership. The user must rejoin via a new invite link.

Role hierarchy #

Bans follow a strict role hierarchy. You can only ban users with a lower role rank than yours:

The owner can never be banned. Self-banning is rejected.

Temporary bans #

Bans can include an expiry duration (in hours). Expired bans are checked lazily on read — the ban is considered inactive once expires_at passes, and the user can accept new invites. Additionally, expired ban records are cleaned up automatically every hour.

Available preset durations: 1 hour, 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days, or permanent.

Hiding messages #

When banning a user, admins can optionally choose to hide the user's messages from other members. When enabled:

• The banned user's messages are filtered from all message queries (channel messages, threads, search, unread counts, pinned messages).
• Their reactions and thread participations are also hidden.
• Messages are not deleted — they are filtered at query time. Unbanning (or un-hiding) immediately restores visibility.

Ban enforcement on write endpoints #

Banned users are blocked from sending messages, editing messages, and adding reactions. These endpoints return a 403 Forbidden response if the user has an active ban in the workspace.

Blocking #

Any workspace member can block another member within a workspace. Blocks are invisible to the blocked user — they receive no notification and can still send messages (which the blocker will not see).

Role restrictions #

Users cannot block members with the admin or owner role. This prevents regular members from silencing workspace leadership. Self-blocking is rejected.

What blocking does #

What blocking does not do #

• The blocked user can still see the blocker's messages. Blocking is one-directional.
• Existing DM channels are preserved. The blocked user can continue sending messages into the DM (the blocker just won't see them).
• Blocking in one workspace does not affect other workspaces. Blocks are workspace-scoped.

Unblocking #

Unblocking immediately restores visibility of all historical messages from the previously blocked user. There is no role restriction on unblocking — you can always undo your own blocks.

Message Pinning #

Channel members who can post can pin and unpin messages. Workspace admins can also pin messages in public channels without explicit channel membership.

Limits #

Each channel has a maximum of 50 pinned messages. This limit is enforced atomically to prevent race conditions.

Behavior #

• Pinning or unpinning a message creates a system message in the channel (e.g., "Alice pinned a message").
• Deleted messages cannot be pinned.
• Pinned messages from banned users with hidden messages are filtered from the pinned list.
• The pinned messages panel shows all pins in a channel, ordered by pin date (newest first).

Audit Log #

All moderation actions are recorded in a per-workspace audit log. Only owners and admins can view it.

Logged actions #

Each entry records the actor, action, target, timestamp, and optional metadata (e.g., ban reason, duration, old/new role, original message content for admin deletes).