Mod Appeals

I think it would be nice if the notifications system allowed you to send an appeal for your moderations. This isn't something I would really need to worry about, but I see a lot of people that could use something like this. At it's simplest, it'd just be a button on the notifcation that says "Appeal this moderation," and when you click it, you can write an explanation for why you don't agree with it and it'll be sent to another mod to check. For a more in-depth explanation of how it could work, the way the GameFAQs forums do their appeals is really good:

For up to 48 hours after your moderation, you can contest it. From your user preferences page, view your moderation history and then select the moderation you wish to examine. If you feel your message did not violate the ToU, you can send it to another moderator along with an explanation. If your argument is successful, the moderator can overturn the decision and restore your lost karma and even return your post to the boards in some cases.

Should you not agree with the moderator's contest decision, you can appeal the moderation to a Lead Moderator and add more to your argument. If the Lead Moderator upholds the moderation, you will not be able to contest another moderation for a month. If you are still not satisfied, you can send it in again with more explanation to an administrator.

However, if your appeal fails again, you will lose the right to contest any further moderations for three months. Abuse of this system will result in the permanent loss of all appealing privileges and possibly the loss of your account.

I think something like this would be useful for a lot of reasons:

• The mods make mistakes sometimes. Obviously they don't try to, but nobody's perfect and mistakes will happen sometimes :o
• If you don't agree with something, there's not really much you can do aside from making a rant thread about it and hoping it gets read.
• Because the only way to try and contest something right now is to make a thread where everyone can see it, it gives a lot of people the perception that the mods suck. Nobody is going to make a thread about when something got modded that they agree was deserved, so people will only see complaints about supposedly unfair moderation, which makes it look like the mods are worse than they really are D:
• Having a guaranteed way for your appeal to be read makes it feel like you're actually being listened to.
• Even if the appeal gets denied, you can at least get a better explanation for why so you don't feel as bad about it ^_^
• You can always punish people that overuse the appeal system or try to abuse it in some way

Sorry for putting a huge explanation for something that should be really simple idea. It's probably something that'd take a good amount of time to properly implement, so I wouldn't expect this to be super high priority, but I do think at some point a feature like this definitely needs to be added. <3