Hm, I have to admit Toady seems to be rapidly losing patience with the forums.
But let me tell you, I have moderated / administrated several forums, and moderation ISN'T the solution. In fact, too much moderation is way more unhealthy for a community that no moderation at all is. The abuse of the ban, mute, lock, edit, delete etc. functions only lead to frustration, anger and bitterness. Over time, people will stop enjoying being here, and will begin flaming, trolling, there will be conflicts, "alternate communities" will be created (we're already there with the new VN forum), people from the "new community" will argue / troll with people from the old one and vice-versa, there will be more conflicts, and at the end the whole community will crumble to its end.
So I don't think this place should be too moderated, that's counterproductive. Look at the facepunch forums : people get banned for next to nothing there. It look like an horrible place to spend some time, and I'll never create an account there.
Another thing : face it, you can't moderate the forum yourself. Especially if you take into account that you're the only developer of one of the bigger game ever created. That's just impossible to manage a forum so big (nearly 9000 users (which only 40 % of them are living in the USA, the rest is all over the planet, so the forum is virtually active all the day), over 650 000 posts... with an average of 1140 post per day) for one person. I don't say you're a bad administrator, just that this is not humanly possible, even with the "report to moderator" feature.
So considering these 2 points, what could be a solution ?
Apparently, if you moderate so much the forums, it's because you "don't want a new DF player to see that side of the community". That's a good reason, for sure. So one think I thought about will be to create a forum (like "Various nonsense", I never been to it but a bunch of people here seems attached to it, so it will be a wise move), and to put into the forum's description a disclaimer saying that you're not responsible for what is in it, etc., to avoid newcomers stumbling into it. The forum itself will be unmoderated, or very lightly, to remove only the more "hardcore" topics (illegal material, for instance). By doing this, all the randomness of the B12 forum will go into this forum, and the rest will be "safe and serious".
TL;DR :
- Too much moderation is worse for the forum's ambiance that no moderation at all.
- Toady may be The great, but he can't complete his megaproject game and moderate a forum with an average of 1000+ post per day at the same time.
- The "I don't want to show a bad image of the forum to newcomers" problem can be fixed by throwing all the "bad content" into a new forum and to put warnings about it.
That's just my idea, maybe you / other users think differently.