If I, as a poster, see a moderator action I think is in error, is there a way to ensure it gets a fair review? How do I do so?
The best way is to e-mail an administrator. In the case of an administrator’s action, e-mail another administrator. Or, if there is a moderator whose judgement you particularly trust, contact them by e-mail or PM to discuss it.
Yes, from the Council of Robot Elders.
Sure, just ask me. 
Silence!
I mean, er, yes, you can always ask us to reconsider something by sending a PM or email, or by starting a thread here. Any of those will usually lead to some behind the scenes talk about the decision.
Yeah, right.
I bet if I did that, you’d ban me before I could finish posti
Strange. It still says “Charter Member” under your name. Your trick failed.
Are you bragging, or complaining?
You can also always write it on a slip of paper, stick it in a bottle, and toss it down a well.
You’re almost as likely to get a followup response.
How much time has C K Dexter Haven spent fielding your complaints and questions over the years, lissener? You are probably the absolute last poster who has grounds to complain about not getting responses from the mods.
That’s, at worst, a bald-faced lie; at best, a huge mischaracterization. Reporting a post or asking for a mod to intervene in a thread is not the subject of this thread.
Administrator followup to a mod’s questionable actions is.
I have once, in the 10 years I’ve been on this board, ONCE, asked to have a moderator’s actions looked at by higher ups. And I got zero response. Zero.
Once, Marley. Once.
–And since you opened this door, and preposterously tried to twist what I said as a complaint against CKD, I think it’s only right that you retract that. I have nothing but appreciation and gratitude for the reasonable treatment I’ve always received from CKD. You have no right whatsoever to twist my post into some kind of backstabbing ingratitude to CKD, when it’s nothing of the kind.
The only moderator whose judgment I have ever officially questioned is twickster, as you should well know. You should be ashamed for dishonestly trying to make it look like my post was a dig at CKD. Shame on you.
And from that extensive track record, you felt secure in making this generalization.
Asking the admins about a moderating decision is one way to get us to take another look at it. But it’s not the only one. It wasn’t singled out by the OP, or in the post you were responding to (I specifically mentioned a bunch of other ways to ask us to reconsider a decision), and you didn’t mention it yourself either. You might want to take a look at what you said compared to what you meant.
Nice. The thread is about one thing. You respond to my post as if it were about something wholly other in order to start a fight between me an CKD. When called on it, you backpedal defensively and refuse to acknowledge that the (charitably speaking) misunderstanding was on your side, and let the insult to the entirely uninvolved third party, CKD, just lie there. Nice.
To the OP: enough evidence of why you shouldn’t even bother?
And your post was about something else: apparently it was about one time you emailed an admins and didn’t get a response. Therefore you said asking the mods to review a decision at all was a waste of time.
Maybe you’re thinking admins review actions independently from mods. That’s not the case. If someone asks us to rethink a decision, the mods and admins discuss it as a group. The admins have some technical access and capabilities the rest of the mods don’t have but they don’t outrank us and don’t override our decisions.
I did what now? I stand behind what I said.
I didn’t misunderstand anything, and I did not insult C K Dexter Haven.
I think every SDMB mod can tell you about times they have reversed a decision after being asked to reconsider. I’ve overturned three or four warnings that I can think of, and I don’t know how many thread closures.
–but we’ll just have to guess how many times they offered no response or followup at all.
Every report is considered. That doesn’t mean that every report is acted upon. We get accusations of trolling or spamming, and we disagree. We get someone offended by some innocuous comment that they take as a personal insult. And so on. We consider every report, and we are GLAD to receive any report and always think about it (even if we don’t take action.) What we do not do is always respond to the person sending the report. Primarily, because it takes a lot of time, and some forums get LOTS of reports. You can always check on your own: go to the thread and see if we took action. If we did, that’s a response. If we didn’t, that means we didn’t feel that there was a rules violation.
To say that there is no followup is distortion. There is usually no direct email response to the person submitting the report. That’ not the same as “no response or followup at all.”
Can we just have a Steel Cage Match between Lissener and the mods and get it over with?
Again, if you read my response to Marley, that is absolutely not what I’m talking about. I have no complaint whatsoever about mod responses or followup to regular issues: e.g., reported issues in a thread, or whatever. I’m only talking about escalated issues with *mod *behavior, which is far more serious, and far more deserving of a response.
Not to mention far rarer: as noted above, I’ve only once asked to have a mod’s behavior examined. Again, I have no other complaint about mod followup.