Hi, users who are promoted to Moderators; do they also automatially become Regulars (even if they have not done the things normally required to become a Regular)? 
AI-generated summary
When a user is promoted to Moderator, their trust level remains the same and they are not automatically granted the “Regular” badge. According to Zeemah and Heather_Dudley, Moderators are subject to the same trust level promotion and demotion principles as non-staff users. Heather_Dudley demonstrated this by promoting a Trust Level 2 (TL2) user to Moderator, who retained their original trust level but gained Moderator permissions. codinghorror noted that staff members enjoy staff privileges regardless of their trust level, as long as they hold the staff position. In FredOslow’s experience, a user’s trust level must be manually reduced to lower than 3 to prevent the “Regular” badge from reappearing after being revoked.
I believe the user’s trust level will remain the same regardless of whether they are staff or not. They will also be promoted or demoted based on the same principals of any non-staff user.
I just did this, promoting a user who is labeled as TL2 to moderator. You can see their admin settings here:
They are not granted any special trust levels, and still don’t meet requirements for TL3. What happens is they’re automatically granted permissions of moderator (which exceeds TL2, 3, and 4) but if their moderator status is revoked, they go back to whatever their trust level is.
The above posts are correct but it is academic, as staff enjoy staff privileges regardless of trust level.. as long as they hold the staff position, of course.
Thanks, you are correct. My hangup was that I invited a user as Staff (was granted user level 3) and then I promoted him to moderator.
Later I though he should not have gotten the “Regular” badge so easy, I wanted him to earn it, so I revoked the badge, but he kept getting it back, because I had to also manually reduce his Trusts level to lower than 3 to stop the Badge from coming back.