+1
Overall, I applaud the initial post, and expanding the moderation team by utilising the player base will probably be a necessary thing especially once MP hits and servers go live.
However, over the years I’ve seen more cases of “community moderators” becoming bad apples than I could shake a stick at. Granted, the majority of these players come mods mostly do a fantastic and thankless job without pay on their own time. They often turn out to be the unsung heroes of a lot of servers. Sadly though, there always seem to be bad apples that creep into that bunch. It’s almost always driven by personal Ego. People get a tiny bit of power and it goes to their heads and they become mini dictators with their ego’s being fed.
I have to say that this is why I would never, ever apply to be one myself. I get would up too easily, I do have an Ego, and I also find it tough to become impartial on some issues. I recognise those personality traits within myself. Sadly, it’s those same traits that normally drive people to apply for these types of roles.
Being here for a long time is a great thing, as is helping people out. You have to look at why people “help out” though. Sometimes, they do it out of a need to feed their own ego and their perception from others. I know of one poster here, who lives a lot in the Tech section who would make a fantastic mod but I won’t mention his name as it is not my right in this context. He is about the only one I have seen in these forums who has never got antagonised by another poster, never posted to seek praise, always goes the extra mile in trying to solve tech issues. He’s never trolled, or taken anything even addressed back at him personally. He was the first person I had a lot of contact with on arrival here, when I was having tech issues and he spent some hours trying to help me figure out my issues. He knows from this who he is.
Sadly, others I have seen, while appearing helpful and no doubt trying to actually be helpful, I get more of a sense of it being due to feeding ego.
In summary, I do think it is a great idea devolving some of the mod tasks to community mods. However, I would caution against taking a “great, we’ve handed that off” approach. I do think that while it would reduce your workload, the dev team then need to keep a very close eye on the actions & posts taken by those new community mods to ensure that no mini dictators have been created! So, reduce the workload modding the community, but instead Mod the Comm Mods 
Just my tuppence hapenny’s worth.
