A state coordinator is the person who keeps one state honest: the claims get decided, the emergency page is current, the chat stays civil and the wiki does not rot. Nobody is paid and nobody is on call. The job is mostly small decisions made promptly.
This page is the whole role, in the order you are likely to meet it. If you have just been appointed, read it once and then come back to it as a reference.
What you hold
Two separate things, which is worth understanding because they have different reach.
Coordinator for your state. This scopes you to one state for the things that are genuinely local - the emergency resources page in particular.
Moderator across the site. This is not limited to your state. Chat moderation, wiki flags, ownership claims and mesh sources all work everywhere. It is deliberate - a bad actor in a chat room at 2am should not wait for the right state’s coordinator to wake up - but it is more reach than the title suggests, so use it the way you would want somebody in another state to use it on yours.
Ownership claims
The recurring job, and the one that matters most. When somebody claims a repeater or a node, approving it lets them edit that entry from then on - so a wrong approval hands a stranger the keys to somebody else’s record.
- Go to /app/admin. Pending claims are at the top, with a count on the stats row.
- Each claim shows who is claiming, which site, and the challenge text they wrote.
- Check the claim against something. A callsign on the licence matching the one on the site is the strongest signal. A plausible-sounding note is not.
- Approve sets them as owner. Reject leaves the site unowned and they can claim again.
When you are not sure, leave it pending and ask in chat. Nothing breaks while a claim waits.
Moderating chat
Commands are typed into the message box of whichever room you are in. The full list is at /chat/help; these are the ones only coordinators have.
| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
/mute sam 30m reason | They can read but not post. Use 10m, 2h, 1d, or leave it blank for until you clear it. |
/ban sam reason | No posting anywhere on the site, and no private messages. This is the heavy one. |
/kick sam | Removes them from this room only. |
/topic · /pin · /motd | Set the room topic, pin a message, set the message of the day. |
Reach for /mute long before /ban. A thirty-minute mute ends most arguments and nobody has to be told they are banned. Always give the reason - it shows in the log, and the version of you reading it in six months will want it.
The wiki
You can edit any article that is not locked: open it and press Edit, or go straight to /wiki/<slug>/edit. Every save keeps a revision, so there is nothing you can break that cannot be put back from the page’s history.
Flags people raise on articles appear on /app/admin under open flags. Read the article, fix it or decide the flag is wrong, then clear it. Clearing a flag without reading the article is the one way to use this badly.
New pages go in at /wiki/new. Short and correct beats long and hedged.
Emergency resources for your state
This is the page that matters when the weather turns: SKYWARN nets, ARES and RACES, NOAA transmitters, calling channels. It is at /states/<YOUR STATE>/emergency - for Oklahoma, /states/OK/emergency.
- Anybody signed in can suggest a row. Suggestions show to you with a dashed border.
- You see an Add a resource form rather than a suggest form, and what you add publishes straight away.
- Each row has controls to publish, edit or remove it.
Check every frequency and every net time against a source before publishing - the club’s own page, the NWS office, the ARRL section site. What you publish here shows on the state hub and inside members’ weather widgets, so a wrong tone or a net that moved three years ago travels further than you would think. Never copy a frequency from memory.
Your state’s group
If you are an officer of your state’s group, its About tab is where you run it - for Oklahoma MeshCore that is /g/ok-meshcore/about.
- Officers - type a username and press Make officer. Step somebody down with the button beside their name. You cannot remove the last officer; appoint a replacement first.
- About - the group’s own description. The first thing a newcomer reads.
- Plans and Ideas - the group’s boards, yours to curate.
Mesh data sources
On /app/admin there is a Mesh sources block listing the analyzers the map pulls node data from. You can add one, switch one off, and fill in the observer setup - the MQTT server, region label and notes that somebody deploying an observer in that region needs. That setup text is shown publicly on the observers page, so write it for a stranger.
What you cannot do
Worth knowing so you do not go looking:
- Appoint or remove coordinators, or make anybody an admin - including yourself.
- Run a group you are not an officer of.
- Edit the emergency page for another state.
- Delete wiki articles, or edit a page an admin has locked.
- Delete other people’s posts, comments or nets.
- Change the home page layout.
- See other people’s node outage reports.
Not built yet
Three things the role formally covers have no screen behind them yet. If you need one of these, ask in chat and it will be done by hand:
- Webcams. They appear on the SKYWARN pages but there is no way to add or edit one in the app.
- Net coordinators. Appointing somebody to run a net in your state has no form.
- Mesh bot listings. The “Weather on the mesh” panel on a state hub is edited directly in the database.
This list should shrink. If one of them turns out to be something you need weekly, say so - that is the argument for building it.
If something looks wrong
Say so early and in public. A coordinator who asks “is this claim real?” in chat is doing the job correctly; the failure mode is quietly approving things to clear the queue. The queue can wait. The record cannot be un-handed-over.