This is a curious thing which tends to vary depending on the site, culture, and an individual moderator's personality. Some sites are stricter and others and laxer and generally, you could make an argument for either side.
On Discord instance for instance, I was a modmin, in other words, a half-step admin. I had many administrator privileges like channel permissions management, but a lot of policy, ban appeals, etc. was delegated directly to the fairly nice owner who actually called the shots.
There's just one snag. It had as many as 30k members, now mind you, only a small portion of these members were actually active, but it meant that the chat was constantly active and needed a large team of moderators to keep an eye on it around the clock and higher level modmins intervening where needed.
Generally, the moderators would issue out hour timeouts and what-not, but when the chat really got chaotic, a modmin who step in, change the channel permissions and essentially lock the channels to all users for about an hour for them to cool down.
The rules were also fairly strict, as just about anything, can lead to a slippery road where things quickly fall completely out of anyone's control. This isn't necessarily right or wrong, but it was a necessity for keeping things in order and not completely degenerate.
No inappropriate language, even things which one might not consider that bad, and generally, keep everything family friendly. If someone really slips up, then more often than not, a moderator will instantly appear to resolve the situation.
However, on a site or chat with a fairly lax culture which isn't anywhere near as fast-moving as that environment, you might be far more forgiving with users and that's largely alright, although even there, there are times where you might ultimately have to let a troublemaker go after you're convinced that they will never really change their ways and become a productive citizen.
On Discord instance for instance, I was a modmin, in other words, a half-step admin. I had many administrator privileges like channel permissions management, but a lot of policy, ban appeals, etc. was delegated directly to the fairly nice owner who actually called the shots.
There's just one snag. It had as many as 30k members, now mind you, only a small portion of these members were actually active, but it meant that the chat was constantly active and needed a large team of moderators to keep an eye on it around the clock and higher level modmins intervening where needed.
Generally, the moderators would issue out hour timeouts and what-not, but when the chat really got chaotic, a modmin who step in, change the channel permissions and essentially lock the channels to all users for about an hour for them to cool down.
The rules were also fairly strict, as just about anything, can lead to a slippery road where things quickly fall completely out of anyone's control. This isn't necessarily right or wrong, but it was a necessity for keeping things in order and not completely degenerate.
No inappropriate language, even things which one might not consider that bad, and generally, keep everything family friendly. If someone really slips up, then more often than not, a moderator will instantly appear to resolve the situation.
However, on a site or chat with a fairly lax culture which isn't anywhere near as fast-moving as that environment, you might be far more forgiving with users and that's largely alright, although even there, there are times where you might ultimately have to let a troublemaker go after you're convinced that they will never really change their ways and become a productive citizen.
