One thing that has been a constant hindrance in our community is the lack of control a user has over their own topics as compared to other forum architecture. Staff may not always be present, and sometimes the ability for an user to exert a certain amount of moderation over their own content makes sense. As such, I think it would be incredibly useful if Discourse added a toggle that instances of Discourse can enable to allow users to moderate their own content.
Particular features I think would be most useful include:
- The ability to lock your own topics
- The ability to post on your own locked topics, provided you were the one who locked it
- The ability to unlock your own topics, provided you were the one who locked it
- The ability to remove users from PM chains you started
- The ability to forcibly add or remove posts from your own topic summary
- The ability to share these self-moderation capabilities on a given topic/PM chain with other users
If you wish to debate the merits of any of these particular ideas, or suggest your own, feel free.
While this should obviously not be the default, and could potentially be restricted to users of TL1 or TL2 and higher, I feel that allowing these features to be toggled on could help reduce the amount of busywork staff have to do to maintain a running forum, allow users to take more control of their content, and generally be helpful for day-to-day usage of Discourse.