Trying to find a post with all the details but have been unsuccessful.
My understanding is that so far category moderators can view flags for their categories. Can they also view topics or post that go into the moderation queue? (Either because the category requires new topic or post approval, or because the overall site settings require the first posts/topics of new users to be approved).
What about allowing category moderators to:
Delete posts in their category
Edit topic titles
Merge topics
Move posts to a new topic
I would also love to see all this for tags. As a forum grows, categories become very limiting. With potentially allowing thousands of tags, it becomes an important part of the taxonomy and classification of topics.
I would actually love to see Discourse lead on tags in forums, as mentioned categories only go so far - but when a forum gets quite large/busy (or you intend it to get big) I feel we could do a lot worse than embrace tags.
Would it be easy enough to add this type of moderation to tags as well? I think that could make Discourse suitable for absolutely massive forums. So you could have moderators for various topics within a forum - on a dog forum this could be mods for individual breeds, on a programming forum this could be mods for each library or framework, on a photography forum this could be mods for each brand, on a gaming forum this could be for each platform or even each game, etc.
Just adding that I really like the idea of extending category moderation to include more editing powers as suggested in the OP. For small-ish communities in particular, my experience is that flags are quite rare, but things like editing titles, fixing links in posts, moving / merging stuff, comes up much more regularly.
A particular use case I’m excited about here is for a learning community, where certain categories = particular instances of a course. Category moderator powers would be a great way to allow the teacher or facilitator for that specific course instance to manage that specific course without requiring full moderator powers across the entire community. Looking forward!