I wish there were a way for moderators and admins to have a normal user experience and enter mod or admin mode only as needed.
Most significantly, I’m an admin, but I don’t want to have a “reply” option on closed topics. I want to have to take an extra step, knowing that I’m doing it, in order to take actions that only mods or admins can take.
Is there any way to distinguish these things or to know at least, as a mod or admin, which things are only showing as options because I’m a mod or admin?
Log out and log back in as a normal non-staff account? More typically we see this concern expressed for admins who can download the site database versus moderators.
I assume you mean “have two different accounts”, right? In our case, we’d rather not have to manage other settings, details, profiles etc. for multiple accounts. I’d also want my normal posts to be associated with me, the same user who has mod and admin permissions.
I’m not concerned about the security issues. I’m talking about problems like accidentally posting a topic in a category a moderator thought was normal but was actually mod-only for posting and thus others visit it and find they can’t reply. There’s nothing indicating to the moderator at the time of posting that this is a moderator-only action as opposed to a normal action.
For example, at Reddit, moderators can enter and leave a moderator mode so that they can participate as normal users most of the time, and only when they really want moderator actions, they turn that on and only then are their actions labeled as being done by a mod…
Some kind of ‘sudo mode’ like Reddit, Confluence, Jira, etc. do?
It’s something that would be nifty to have but we don’t support that at this time.
How I would probably handle this would be using a specific colour for categories that are not “normal” posting categories and train the staff to expect this.
There’s also the possibility to highlight staff actions taken with “Staff Colour” to distinguish staff messages from regular postings.
I have an odd idea for a workaround:
In firefox there is a plugin called “multi account containers”, which can be used to have two tabs of the sites open while being logged in with different accounts.
You could either have a second account as a normal user to see what others see and then use the first account to post and do your moderation or you could even have a second admin account and with that grant mod-rights to your fist account only when needed.
Yes, but that make every single post from someone in the Staff group be that color, right? So, it wouldn’t let the same staff user choose when to be acting as staff.
And yes, a “sudo mode” is one way to describe what I’m asking about.
No, that’s an on-demand action taken in the 
menu:
The multi-account FF plugin idea would indeed make it easier to at least see the distinction via two separate accounts, but it’s not a workaround for having distinct states within one account.
I assume you mean as the best workaround to consider for now, right?
Anyway, per meta.discourse… should I open a new topic somewhere to function as a request for the “sudo mode” sort of option?
This was more-or-less asked for a while ago here: