User Abilities (privileges)
Even the most active and reputable members of a community once started as new users and then progressed their way "up" by continuously making good contributions. As participating in a Q&A community is a skill to be learned, we sandbox new users to protect both them and us. When they show that the community can trust them, by way of making constructive contributions, we'll lift new user restrictions. When they demonstrate that they know how to edit or to moderate, we'll grant them Abilities to do so more effectively with less supervision.
There are 6 Abilities you can earn on this site (not necessarily in this order):
- Participate is automatically granted when you join a community, and allows you to post a limited number of posts and raise a limited number of flags.
- Participate Everywhere lifts new user restrictions and removes some rate limiting.
- Edit Posts allows you to edit other people's posts without review.
- Edit Tags allows you to edit tag metadata.
- Vote on Holds gives you votes to put posts "on hold" and to reopen them if they've been closed.
- Curate gives you access to advanced moderation tools such as seeing certain types of flags, or deleting or locking posts.
Some of the most active users are also elected as moderators.
You can see which Abilities you have earned and what you need to do to earn them here:
