I’m not sure why that is completely relavent here (though if I created a thread and someone renamed it without explaining why, I’d get pretty annoyed). Just because Regulars get certain rights, doesn’t mean that they should get more.
My thought process is something like this. Lets take the average Minecraft server as an example here. They often have a few players that will log on and “report for staff duties” or claim to come from Planet Minecraft and say that they need op to review your server (as an aside, I’ve had some amusing exchanges regarding this!). These players are asking for these “staff” ranks for (primarily) one of two reasons:
- They want to cause problems on your server
- They just want power, without understanding the responsibility behind them.
Now, imagine that your server had a similar system to the Discourse forums. Regulars on your server currently can change a player’s nickname, and teleport them around the server. This has the potential to be annoying, but is quite easy to rectify, and keep the target player/victim about.
Now, lets say that Regulars could attain a “pre-Mod” rank, let’s say, “helper” rank. This rank has the rights to ban a new player, or mute them - let’s say a new player joined in the past week. A malicious user who realised that this was the case would be likely to wait out this period that they need to, gain the rights, and do the damage. Once the damage is done, it’s much more difficult to reverse than just reverse the actions, you may have lost the banned/muted players forever - the banned players may just think that the server is not worth appealing for, and will never return. Yes, you might mitigate this by having three “helpers” ban a player, but what’s to stop a group of users coming through the system doing this?
The same applies to letting Regulars approve messages. You could get users who come up in threes and approve everything.
There is little to no abuse now, because the Regulars abilities aren’t well exposed, nor is there anything of huge value to malicious users. However, the ability to essentially shut out a potential new member of the community is a huge ability - and will be an obvious ability to the rest of the server, for which those who are malicious, or simply are power hungry/like to brag to their friends. That is my worry.
Edit: Clarified the post slightly, realised that I was letting the analogy flow into my point a bit too much! Meaning has not changed.