User blog comment:Mira Laime/Moderators Without Borders — a New User Group is Coming/@comment-31543510-20170815205233/@comment-26339491-20170815205951

Where there is no active admin, it can be very difficult to get a community to promote a helper staff send them. For those cases, it's faster and less complicated if the Discussions moderator already has the necessary rights. Exactly those kinds of cases are also the reason why the global Discussions moderators have local blocking rights and the ability to edit categories. Ideally, a local admin would take care of these two things, but none may be around.

We've also deliberately decided not to make the group more VSTF-like, because they are two separate groups with distinct purposes. The new moderators shouldn't need global blocking or CheckUser rights since they're primarily there to defuse social situations, give Discussions structure and support the new and clueless users. They're not there to hunt serious spammers or Terms of Use violators (those are still cases for VSTF and staff).

We'll see how the group works with its current set-up, but of course it's not impossible we might find adjustments necessary down the road.