Moderators (and staff) have an odd position on a forum. On the one hand, they have official duties to perform:
- Handling flags
- Making decisions about suspending users
- Taking actions to reduce needless drama
They often are also members of the community who participate in discussions. It’s not at all a good idea to ignore moderators who are performing their official duties. (There’s no upside.) But I can see an argument for ignoring moderators when they are acting a regular members within a discussion. Just because they are moderator doesn’t mean they can’t be annoying.
So I could see a scenario where it would make sense for a user to ignore moderator posts and messages, but not warnings or posts that have “Staff color” turned on. The difficulty is that moderators don’t always think to use those options. There’s also advantages to having moderators behave with moderation in public. Letting people ignore moderators via the system itself might communicate moderators are not held to a higher standard.
It wouldn’t be crazy to have this as a site setting (default: moderators and staff can’t be ignored) but I struggle to think of a scenario where I’d want to turn on the ability to ignore mods. It just adds too much friction for moderators and not much benefit for a community.