This is something that is being done by a plugin we developed internally (and currently is broken due to a recent update in discourse ).
In our opinion, moderators should have full access to all the tools to moderate content in their own category, which includes things like Set Slow for replies, add Staff Notices, Staff Colour, Change Ownership, etc etc.
The only function we understand would require more work is the ban/silence as currently bans/silences are site-wide and could be seen as a good deterrent compared to a section ban.
However, a way to raise a ban request to the forum moderators would be welcome as it would save having to ping moderators (via pm or chat) every time there is an issue that requires a ban/silenceā¦ This can be a further iteration however, so not much point in pushing this now.
To give a clear indication, from this list:
Moderation History
Add Staff Color
Add Staff Notice
Change Ownership
Grant Badge
Lock Post
Make Wiki
From the above actions, the possibility to multiselect topics and perform some actions in bulk:
This should be split, I suppose, but itās a matter of limiting access to data and noise.
TL4 in our community (quite big for a non-company forum) are simply non-existent because if you are to moderate others, youāll be a moderator. No reason for you to be a āspecial userā.
Category moderators are trusted users, but to avoid accidentally moderating other sections, limiting the amount of moderation queue messaging, etc, it makes sense to make them category moderators instead of forum-wide moderators.
TL4 also donāt receive flags as far as I recall, but even if they did, again, they would receive them forum-wide which goes against the āminimize noiseā philosophy.
Overall anyway, each community has its own specific use cases, and it makes much more sense to create a feature that allow the users to customize the way they have a structure instead of impose an opinionated one. Hence, why I think an ACL would be a much better approach rather than static roles and permissions.
I can see why this would be beneficial for some instances. However for our use case this would be a backwards step - our Category Moderators are sometimes topic specialist rather than expert Discourse users. This means we would want to give them a restricted set of moderator tools.
Ideally, having some way to customise the rights that a Category moderator has would be nice, but if I recall correctly from the Trust levels table, some of the Category Moderatorās rights are already set at TL level - something I think you touch on with your reply as well.
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