Yep, that was my idea as well.
Now that I look at it more in details, I realized it's a bug.
I'd try to fix it by changing:
'is_admin' => in_array(1, $user_info['groups']),
to:
'is_mod' => false,
'is_admin' => in_array(1, $user_info['groups']),
in Load.php.
The issue is that is_mod is set only in loadBoard, but the function is not (always) called when using SSI.
So move the set of is_mod to loadUserSettings I think makes most sense.