Over the past year, the chat room has seen a surge of activity, with a whole bunch of new users joining and generally keeping chat extremely lively. I'm happy to see that, especially when I can easily remember a couple years ago, where it wasn't uncommon to see messages in chat from days or even weeks past, because it was so empty.
However, with this comes the need for better moderation for the chat, and at this point in time, I think that's something we're lacking. As of right now, the only active staff member that frequents chat to my knowledge is PX, and while she does a very good job at keeping order, it's not like she's there 24/7. This is becomes a bit more of a problem during the evening hours in American timezones, when there's usually a decent volume of users in, but no staff around. In the past, HT would generally be around during this time, and him and PX could cover each other's bases pretty well, but this is no longer the case.
This is compounded by the fact that we have a lot of young users that are prone to getting into squabbles, new users that might start breaking rules inadvertently by not knowing any better, or both (I know some of them will probably see this; sorry guys, its true). These things by themselves might not be such a big issue; if chat weren't active, a low amount of moderation would be fine, and if there were more staff around, then we don't have to worry about keeping order. But both of these things are sort of working in tandem at the moment, and while it's stable right now, I can easily see this becoming a potential problem down the line.
It would be nice if more active staff members could be on chat, but that's not something I want to push onto any of them; I'm sure you guys have real lives you have to focus on, and you can't be on a Pokemon chat room all the time. Aside from that, staff members are usually nominated for their contributions to the main site, and that's where their priorities usually lie, so if they aren't active on chat for one reason or another, then that's not something I want to force on them.
However, the fact still stands that we need better chat moderation, so what I propose is making a separate staff role just for moderating chat. All that you'd need to do is give a user Kickbot permissions, minus all the other Editor perks, and that would about do it. The mod team can decide who they think would be best worthy for such a role. I don't think that it'd be too hard to implement, but I talked with Fizz just to be sure (I'm not typing this much just to get my idea shot down bc technical constraints), and he thinks it might be able to be done, so PM, if you read this, tell me if it can be done, and if it can, I strongly encourage implementing it!
Edit: Bumping this because I think this is still very relevant, and I believe the community agrees with me, since this is one of the most upvoted suggestions on the site. PM, if you're out there, your input or feedback would be much appreciated
