I know it’s been said multiple times that you guys want to avoid an overly complex role-based permission structure and that’s laudable, but by removing the concept of a global moderator, you’re just making more work for the forum admin. Ideally you have few admins (maybe one or two) and scale up moderators as needed, but in a large forum that has lots of groups, the small number of admins still have to manually assign users to groups—something that arguably isn’t an administrator task.
I should need admin privilege to modify core settings, but not to swizzle group membership. To create groups, probably; to add users to them? Not IMO.
@codinghorror’s solution of either open groups or allowing mods to invite users to groups they’re already in are two potential workarounds, but they’re not necessarily desirable. A better idea might be to either allow for the concept of group ownership by any user, or require a group to be owned by a moderator. The group owner could then add and remove users from that group.
It’d be sort of like per-category admins, but targeted at groups instead of categories. An admin could create the group and set its initial owner (including to the admin themselves if desired), and then the group owner could go do the rest of the assignments.
Alternately, enable a “global moderator” flag where a moderator so flagged is allowed to moderate all categories and modify group memberships.
It’s obviously a feature I can live without, but the workaround I’m using on my own forum is just to throw up my hands and give all my mods admin powers. It’s not a good workaround, but there’s no other way right now to do what I want.