Staff & Voice Transparency

Responsible use of staff powers

Staff powers are for moderation, support, security, troubleshooting, and operation of Nova. Staff must not use elevated access to harass users, access accounts or systems without authorization, evade lawful restrictions, or interfere with the service outside legitimate staff work.

High-impact actions should be connected to a valid moderation, support, security, or operational reason and may be recorded for accountability.

Staff hierarchy

Nova uses the hierarchy User → Admin → Developer → Owner.

• Admins primarily moderate users, chat, reports, support, and voice rooms.
• Developers rank above Admins and can perform elevated system/staff actions and manage Admin-level roles or actions where enabled.
• Owner is the highest staff level and can manage Developer-level authority and other owner-only controls.

Tasks and Requests

Admins can send requests upward when an action requires Developer or Owner authority. Developers and Owner can assign work to staff. Nova stores the task/request details, assignment, status, target, resolution, and completion information so staff work has context and accountability.

Creating a task does not itself bypass permissions. The person completing an action still has to hold the server-side role required for that action.

Password-reset requests

An Admin may request a password reset rather than performing it directly. A Developer or Owner with sufficient authority can complete the reset for an account below their own staff level. Nova stores the new password only as a derived hash and salt. Staff should never copy a user's plaintext password into a task or request.

Developer/Owner VC bypass

Developer and Owner roles can join active Nova voice rooms without normal admission and can bypass capacity, lock, and private-room restrictions. These abilities are role-native: a Developer does not need the room host to grant permission first.

Vanish mode

Developer and Owner can deliberately choose the separate Vanish entry option. Vanish mode hides the staff member from the normal visible participant list and participant count shown to ordinary users and Admins. It also avoids presenting the staff join as a normal visible room membership.

Vanish does not make the staff member invisible to Nova's systems. The backend records the staff member's hidden room presence and a voice event. Authorized higher-level staff can use those records for accountability. Voice-event records are configured to expire after 90 days.

Moderation authority inside VCs

Normal room-host controls cannot be used to override a higher-level Developer/Owner in the same way they can be used on ordinary members. Elevated staff access exists for administration, moderation, troubleshooting, and support.

Auditability

High-impact staff actions can be written to Nova's admin audit log with the acting staff account, target, reason, metadata, and time. Admin audit records are configured to expire after 365 days. Staff task/request records currently do not auto-expire.