Hmm, true.
Staff Roles:
Moderators: Act on the minor matters and recommend more serious punishments.
Super Moderators: Oversee the moderators (and review their actions), and act on the more serious matters (which includes anything with permanent consequences for a user).
Admins: General forum management, oversee all Appeals.
Empress_Zoe: Oversees the Admins, is the only authority that matters on ToS issues, approves permanent bans for non Spam accounts.
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Let's see.
-User reports are anonymized to the Moderators and all infraction messages are anonymized as coming from "The Moderation Team".
This is to cut down on potential bias issues in both directions.
-The only punishments that Mod's can issue are threadbans (duration is at their discretion) and one or three day subforum bans. They are the first view on reports and if they feel that a more serious/long term punishment is warranted then they are supposed to recommend that to the Super Moderators.
-Once a Mod has issued a warning, resolved a report, or recommended escalation their role is done.
-SMod's review Mod actions and handle the issuance of more permanent penalties.
-Appeals are public and are handled by the Admins (generally as a group). If you are appealing short duration thread bans or the 1/3 day subforum bans then you generally better be able to show that the Mod was pretty much egregiously wrong, otherwise the Admin's may well hit you for harassing them and find you guilty of wasting the courts time. Generally the more significant/longer lasting the punishment the more you can get away with in an appeal.
-Zoe can override the Admins if she feels clemency is warranted, has the final say on all permanent forum bans, and is the sole judge on ToS issues.
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To sum it up, as a Mod your job is to deal with the Report queue in the first instance, set an example for the rest of the forum members on how to behave, and to tell people/threads to cool off when they are getting close to the edge (or give them a time out if they cross the line).