Could Someone Explain the Various Types of Moderators, Please?

Academic

Title says it all, really. We have moderators assigned to a particular forum (or to particular fora), there' something called a "category moderator," and a number of others. I suspect that I'm not the only member who thinks that a brief description of their respective responsibilities would useful.

Many thanks in advance,

Academic

Beasty

There are the following descriptions within the site FAQs (along with a lot more useful info)

Moderator:
Moderators are the care-takers of the forums on boards.ie. It's their job to make sure everything's running smoothly and they can perform certain administrative functions on the forums they are charged with like deleting spam, merging threads or banning troublesome users. Moderators only look after specific forums on the website, and you will find out which by checking their user profile.
Moderators that are posting in forums they do not moderate are for all intents and purposes, regarded as Registered Users. Inside their own forums however, they are responsible for keeping it happy and healthy, and have the power to lay down the law as well as restrict your access from those forums if you should break the specific forum's rules. Each forum has a Charter which is available at the top of the list of Threads. For this reason, it may seem like boards.ie has an overzealous amount of moderators, but bear in mind each Mod has their own small jurisdiction. There are over 550 Mods on boards.ie (as of April 2009), but we have over 1200 forums!
All moderators on Boards.ie are Volunteers, and are paid nothing for their time or energy. Also, users are only ever approached to be moderators by CMods and Admins and other moderators, never the other way around.

(I've corrected the reference to SMods as it's now CMods)

Category Moderator/CMod:
Category Mods are Moderators that not only moderate specific forums but entire categories of forums. For example, the Games Category Mods (CMod or Cat Mods ) supervise the moderation of, and moderate themselves, all forums found under the Games heading. There is no CMod for the Hosted Forums or for the Sys/System Forums (for which Admins/Office staff are left to moderate). 

(again a slight change to remove the SMod reference)

and for completeness

Admin:
Originally, these were the people who started and owned Boards.ie but the team has expanded and is now also made up of volunteers. These people moderate boards as a whole, and are typically looked upon to moderate problems which are not restricted to one forum or one category. Admins have the ability to site ban very troublesome users and are considered the highest authority on boards. They help decide site policy and direction as well as deciding on new forum creation and helping to pick moderators.

Just to clarify though the site does now have full time employees, including a Community Manager, Niamh, where the "highest authority" now rests, certainly in terms of posters you will regularly see on the site (again there is a brief description in the FAQs)