Moderators Moderation improvements
 

I've recently made my first foray into the world of forum hosting and, all in all, things are going well. Spam was an issue at first, and then oranizing stuff in an intuitive way became the next hurdle, but I've now ironed out pretty much all of the "growth pains", so to speak, and I'm now at the point where I think I'm ready to take the next step from initial roll-out and start adding features which are helpful for my users.

I think one thing that would be just as helpful for me as for my users would be to expand moderation abilities. I do currently have a core team of admins and moderators who I trust enough to take care of this, but no matter how many people I 'promote', there will always be times where abuse occurs when no one is around. Offering my users the ability to moderate their own threads would be a BIG plus. It might also be nice to let users build up lists of co-moderators (a la "friends" lists, but separate) to identify people that should be able to moderate their thrieds (i.e.: user A designates user B as a moderator of threads created by user A). Ideally, this is something that I would also be able to manage globally (flip a single switch to turn the option off for everyone) or possibly on a per-user or per-group basis (i.e.: enabled for Group A, B and C, and also User X, User Y and User Z).

How difficult would something like this be to pull off? This would greatly reduce my dependance on standard moderators - possibly to the point where I would only have a few admins and that's it. More than anything, I think this really empowers users to engage in constructive debates and keep things clean. Too often have I noticed threads get totally derailed by people who are only interested in griefing and trolling. Not only does it inflate a trolls ego to a huge degree, but it can be very off-putting for the thread author and potentially drive them away. Instead, they'd be able to take ownership of that thread and make sure it's just as useful as they intended; obviously they created it for a reason.

Thanks in advance!