The Problem with Scattered Moderator Tools
Your moderators are busy people. When something needs attention, they shouldn't have to hunt through the dashboard, remember URLs, or ask you where to find things. A dedicated moderator hub — a single page visible only to your mod team — gives them a home base where they can quickly see what matters and get to work.
Vanilla Forums' Custom Pages feature makes this surprisingly easy to set up.
What You Can Build
A moderator hub can include whatever your team needs most. Some ideas:
- A welcome message with current priorities or community guidelines for mods
- Quick links to moderation queues, reported posts, and ban lists
- Links to your internal mod documentation or playbook
- A pinned discussion thread for mod team communication
- Custom widgets showing community health stats or recent activity
The page is yours to design — and only your mods will ever see it.
Setting It Up
Step 1: Create a Custom Page
In your Vanilla dashboard, navigate to Appearance > Custom Pages and create a new page.
Give it a meaningful name like Moderator Hub or Mod Central.
Step 2: Choose a Smart URL
When setting the page URL, use a two-segment path like:
/mod-hub/overview
The first segment (/mod-hub/) acts as a namespace. If you later add more mod-only pages — a stats page, a resources page — they can all live under the same path:
/mod-hub/overview
/mod-hub/resources
/mod-hub/guidelines
This keeps things organized and opens the door to path-based logic in widgets or custom JavaScript down the road.
Step 3: Restrict Access to Moderators Only
This is the key step. On the Custom Page settings, set the View permission to your moderator role (or whichever roles should have access). Regular members and guests will simply not see the page — it won't appear in navigation and the URL will return a permission error if accessed directly.
Step 4: Build Out the Page
Use the Layout Editor to add widgets to your page. Here's a layout that works well in practice:
Featured Links — Quick Access to Mod Tools The Featured Links widget is a natural fit for a row of quick-access buttons at the top of the page. Configure each link to point directly to the moderation tools your team uses most — the report queue, the ban list, the approval queue, user management — whatever your mods reach for most often. No more digging through the dashboard menu.
Featured Collection — Curated "Need to Know" Content Create a dedicated Collection in your community and curate it with posts your mod team should be aware of: pinned guidelines, escalation examples, announcements, or anything you want to surface deliberately. The Featured Collection widget will display these posts front and center. Whoever manages the collection controls what the team sees.
"Keep an Eye On" Category — Recent Discussions If you have a category you use to flag sensitive or watch-worthy content, drop a Discussion List widget filtered to that category directly on the hub. Your mods can see at a glance what's been active there without having to navigate to it separately.
Call to Action — Jump to a Filtered Moderation Queue Finish the page with a Call-to-Action widget linked to a specific, pre-filtered view in the Moderation Tools — for example, reported posts from the last 48 hours, or flagged content in a particular category. One click and your mod is exactly where they need to be.
Let your imagination go These are just a few of the widgets you can build or adapt. If you want to get advanced, you can create very specific tools using our API and JavaScript
Voilá
But you can do much better than that.
Some Pro Tips
- Move any "mods only" widgets from other pages to this page so that when your mods are browsing the community they are seeing what your end users are seeing.
- Create a link that is restricted to moderator role on the Quick Links on the home page so the mods don't lose the page.
- Give the page a distinct design so you know you are in mod section.
The Result
Your moderators get a professional, centralized home base inside the community — not a separate tool, not a pinned post buried in a category, but a real dashboard-style page that's part of the community experience. It signals that their role matters, and it makes them more effective from day one.
For more on Custom Pages in Vanilla, with all the technical ins-and-outs, click here.
