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@Buddamoose
The site itself is a place intended to foster intellectual and rational debate. How do you propose a website that adjudicates from on high with no feasible recourse against, potential harmful to welfare as a whole, bans, not consequentially lose userbase growth and/or begin to shrink?
Moderation has always been done from on high. I hardly think you could make the argument that it was Max's policies towards pans and user punishments that drove DDO into decline.
And moderator decisions when exclusively their own, should not preclude any independent examination.
Then you're essentially having tiered moderating. None of that refutes the idea that a single examiner/mod is going to be making an unreviewable, final call at some point down the line. The extra bureaucracy only drags out the process and inhibits the expediency needed to address issues in realtime.
Reasonable checks being placed on potential abuses isnt foolish.
Sure, but what are reasonable checks? It doesn't seem like you and I disagree that there should be checks. Rather, we disagree on what those checks should be. Having two mods who need to come to a unanimous decision on perma-bans or long temp-bans prevents a single mod from acting capriciously. It is unlikely that both mods will make a willfully irresponsible call. More than that, such a system would require two sets of eyes to review the facts. This, effectively, acts as a second investigation and a second opinion, which is something you seem to want. This is the only check I really see as appropriate, excluding, of course, the fact that mods must remain accountable to site ownership, which I'll address below.
Unilateral Moderator Control fmpov is equally as absurd.
As I said previously: "That said, if a mod is clearly and egregiously abusing or misusing their authority, the site owner should be prepared to remove them from the position. But, the site owner must be careful not to remove a mod simply because they made an unpopular decision--the site owner must understand that a mod can only be removed if a pattern of severe, inexcusable, and ongoing abuses of mod power occur. Mostly, the mods should just be left alone to do their job. Some complaints, esp. after unpopular decisions, are inevitable, and we mustn't defrock a mod on such a tenuous justification." Plus, the site owner has an incentive to ensure semi-decent modding, so as not to chase away users, which, again, was a concern of yours.
But ultimately, just like Max and Juggle, mods are externally accountable to the site owner. They are internally accountable (i.e. they must have each other's respect). And, they are indirectly accountable to the usership, which exerts pressure on site ownership. Thus, the mods are not unaccountable, and not unilaterally empowered in the sense I think you mean it.
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I'm not going to get into your other comments much, except to say that term limits are unworkable because--to be painfully blunt--there aren't enough trustworthy users to fill the role of mod. I'll also add, briefly, that popular elections for mods would be a disaster. Just look at how the presidential elections went, and then multiply that times ten. Moreover, by making mods answerable to voters, you incentivize the mods to pander to certain constituencies, which makes it unlikely they mod fairly once in power.
