Here's what I would propose: Take the mods out of the rolling process as much as possible. Let the involved parties take care of it.
Rules of Combat:
Combat is engaged when one or more players commit a violent action against one or more other players.
When combat is engaged, roundtable turns will begin among all parties directly involved in the engagement. Turn order is determined by initial rolls whenever combat involves more than two players. The attacking player goes first.
At the beginning of his/her turn the player will make a choice to either: 1) propose an action and a roll, or - 2) dispute any of the actions/rolls which have been proposed by other players since their last turn. If no disputes have been raised since the player's previous turn, his/her previous turn becomes canonicall and can not be disputed.
A dispute will include a reason for the dispute, and can be approved by either a mod or the player whose action is in dispute. A moderator can approve or deny a dispute but a disputed player can only approve the dispute.
If a dispute is approved by either a mod or the player whose action is in dispute, the combat engagement reverts to the point immediately following the last approved turn and it becomes the disputed player's turn again.
Rolls are confirmed in IRC by either a moderator or all players involved in combat.
TL;DR - player-disputable turntable actions. By submitting an action, you approve all previous actions and rolls (check your opponent's rolls in IRC!). The game can proceed without moderator intervention.
This usually happens for a couple of reasons. The most common reason is there is other stuff going on on the sub that needs to be addressed. Each day posts will be flaired, and there is one post that takes up 80% of the time mods spend sorting the posts, usually because it falls in a grey area between being technically within the rules, but bad or unfair for the game.
Another reason is there tends always be more than one conflict post. When someone posts a conflict post, other people are more likely to post. This meant that there was sometimes a backlog of 4-5 conflict posts.
I would also like to point out that we didn't even have the automated rolling sorted out until right at the end of the last season, we only used it for about 3 conflicts, so all of the others were done one roll at a time. Manual rolls took hours, the automated rolls took 5-10 mins.
This would be ideal. Unfortunately, there have been far too many instances of people either not understanding or abusing the ruleset, so I don't know how we would let people conduct their own battles. In season one, players sometimes went weeks arguing their stance on a set of posts, though it didn't happen as much in season two because we were a lot quicker to draw the line on posts being flaired.
It results in an apathy for moderating the sub. Some conflicts, and not just the conflict posts, didn't get dealt with because nobody could be bothered to do them anymore. It could have been avoided by having a very comprehensive ruleset, but that just wasn't possible because it is very difficult to get people interested in a sub that has a 20 page long ruleset.
This is part of the reason why I suggested 20th century powers. Instead of having that 20 page long ruleset, we can actually point to real things that happened, and draw conclusions as to what should and shouldn't be allowed, and also what the outcomes of certain posts/actions would be. The entire process of flairing posts, conflict resolution, talking to players etc. would be far more streamlined purely because we can have policies based on actual events.