Occasionally, a &xep0045; moderator might wish to moderate certain groupchat messages by, for example, retracting them from the groupchat history as part of an effort to address and remedy issues such as message spam, indecent language for the venue or exposing private third-party personal information. Alternatively, a moderator might want to correct a message on another user's behalf, or flag a message as inappropriate without requiring that it be retracted.

Due to the federated nature of XMPP and as with any content moderation tool, the moderation request can only be considered as a hint and clients which don't support message moderation are not obligated to enforce any such request.

If a client or service implements message moderation, it MUST specify the 'urn:xmpp:message-moderate:0' feature in its service discovery information features as specified in &xep0030; and the Entity Capabilities profile specified in &xep0115;.

Consider a situation where a user sends a message that may be deemed inappropriate by a groupchat moderator. The groupchat service will append a &xep0359; stanza ID to the message before relaying it to all participants..

The moderator sees the message and indicates to their client that the message should be retracted. The client then sends an IQ stanza to the MUC service, requesting that the message be retracted.

An archiving service MAY replace the contents of a message that was retracted due to moderation with a 'tombstone' similar to the one described in &xep0424;.

The archiving service replaces the message with a <moderated/> element which contains a <retracted/> element. The <moderated/> element MUST include a 'by' attribute specifying the JID of the moderating entity. The <retracted/> element SHOULD contain a 'from' attribute which points to the JID of the author of the retracted message.

If the message was sent in a semi-anonymous MUC, the occupant id from &xep0421; needs to be included for the moderator and the message author in the <moderated/> and <retracted/> elements respectively.

A moderator MUST NOT send a moderation request for a message with non-messaging payloads. For example, a moderator MUST NOT moderate a roster item exchange request or a file transfer part.

In MUCs, only moderation messages (not tombstones, but messages containing the <moderate/> element) received from the MUC service itself are legitimate, all other such messages MUST be discarded.

If message moderation includes a retraction request, the MUC or other service that supports message retraction SHOULD prevent further distribution of the retracted message by the service and the archiving service MAY replace the retracted message with a tombstone as detailed in &xep0424;.

There can never be a guarantee that a moderated message will appear as such in all clients. Clients should therefore, when possible, inform users that no such guarantee exists.

To prevent message spoofing, it's very important to check that the moderation message comes from the MUC service (as explained in the Business Rules section).

None.