Allow moderators to create groups

Feature
7

We do have available Admins. If we need to do something “adminy”, we can ask and it will get done. I just don’t feel that creating a group should require an Admin.

Let me ask this: Why is there a site setting to allow Moderators to create categories (even allowing them to create categories they can’t see after creation), but you are very opposed to a site setting to allow Moderators to create groups?

I am having a very hard time understanding why there is a distinction between the two! What makes groups so special that they require an Admin’s involvement?

Edit: So, I thought about this more as the day went on. I looked into the current #faq on the various user state in Discourse, and found the following.

Admin

Admin users are the superusers in the system, they can:

  • Impersonate non admins
  • Change site settings
  • Create groups
  • Amend site customizations
  • Perform all the actions moderators can perform
  • Read any personal message

Moderator

Power user capable of moderating the site:

  • Gets shield icon next to name on posts
  • Can perform all actions Staff can perform

Staff

A user that is either an admin a moderator or both.

  • Immune to rate limits
  • Can process flags
  • Can delete topics and posts, split topics, merge topics, hide topics and so on.
  • Can view user info including email address

Going through the list of Admin only privileges, I looked to see what each of the items was, and how powerful/dangerous it was, particularly with day-to-day moderation in mind:

  • Impersonate non admins
    • I cannot think of a valid reason a moderator would need to do this frequently. Impersonation would be useful if a user is reporting an issue that you cannot repro as staff, but a moderator could just as easily create a sock account to look into this.
  • Change site settings
    • Site settings shouldn’t be changing on a regular basis, and thus moderators should not need access.
  • Create groups
    • This is the odd one to me. It seems similar to create categories, which is an existing site setting to allow moderators, and depending on the site could be something that is used frequently.
  • Amend site customizations
    • Similar to site settings, these shouldn’t be changing on a regular basis.
  • Perform all the actions moderators can perform
    • Not-relevant to this discussion, moderators already can do what moderators do.
  • Read any personal message
    • This is in-between for me. I cannot see a reason why a moderator willy-nilly would be reading PMs, but there are some cases (like a flagged PM) where this could be necessary for a moderator.

So, going back to codinghorror’s question, looking at the list of Admin only rights, almost all of their rights should not be needed on a regular basis, on 90+% of the forums out there. Groups just seem like an outlier in their list of rights as something that could reasonably be used more frequently. If the admins so desire, a moderator should be able to create groups without also having permissions to modify site settings, view all PMs, impersonate users, etc.

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