In the past, we've agreed on rotating moderatorship as a way to ensure that moderators don't forget the experience of a standard user, and understand moderation from both sides of the arrow. This is an excellent idea, in fact I have already forgotten how a normal user experiences the site - if nothing goes wrong, I'd be resigning by the end of the year.
However, I do have some concerns about implementing this.
Certain tasks, such as management of community ads and user administration (access to the admin@physicsoverflow.org account), are quite tedious and delicate respectively. I'm really afraid that the future moderation team will not be able to take care of these issues.
For managing community ads, one needs to constantly monitor the community ads voting thread to check for new votes, and update the javascript code in the admin panel accordingly. This is a relatively easy task for me, really just because most of the community ads are posted by me, and because I wrote the script for the community ads. There are some other scripts and styles as well, which I doubt anybody else would bother to maintain.
As for user administration, it's a really delicate issue, and there's a tedious process involved in finding out if a reclamation request is genuine. I'm not sure, if anybody besides Dilaton and myself would be willing to invest much effort into this task.
The solution I have in mind would be to resign, but (publicly, transparently of coruse) create a new account type "admin.retired", for each retired moderator - the user history for this account would be completely public (every single thing, including things like votes, etc.), and the account would not be allowed to do anything except resetting accounts and editing the scripts in the admin panel. This means that the user history should be completely blank, and if it's not, polarkernel would always be able to investigate who did what and lock the violating moderator out of his account (or just ban the account).
Does anyone have any concerns about this? Any better ideas?
Update: This user level has now been implemented by polarkernel.