Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment--20160428211300/@comment-1251315-20160429064422

There is some confusion that seems to be existing around the two groups we had.

We had forum moderators and forum operators. Forum Moderators was essentially what the Discussion Moderators group included: the only difference between our custom forum moderator group and the discussion mods group is that disc. mods has the "notifyeveryone" user right. Users in this group had the ability to do some basic moderation, but could not highlight threads, block users or completely delete threads from view.

We also had a separate user group for Forum Operators. These existed for the purpose of creating a group of users who managed the forums: this wiki had a problem years ago whereby sysops had certain user rights but were not moderating the forums, so the intention was to have moderators and operators of the forums. The Forum Operators had all of the permissions of the Forum Moderators, but additionally included some higher rights, such as blocking, highlighting threads and deleting threads (walladmindelete).

However, given that the wiki's only forum operator as of late seems to have been doing very little that warrants the whole forum operator group, I have no issue with its removal. However, I now take issue with the fact that a whole bunch of users have the notifyeveryone user right: forum mods did not have this right because it has a chance of being abused with moderators highlighting threads that do not need to be highlighted, which is why this right was granted to operators. This is because operators were considered to have better judgement and would know what threads to highlight.

I would only accept the changes if the discussion moderators user group lost notifyeveryone. As a result, it would become necessary to look at promoting a forum moderator to sysop so that they can have that specific user right.