So here's a suggestion. How about we elect moderators? On the last week of each month, there will be a poll in every forum section to vote who gets to be a moderator out of a list of people Today or ThreeToe pick. If we're unhappy with a moderator, we just vote him out.
The biggest problem I see with this is the overhead time that it would take for them to mod and un-mod people. In fact, it would probably take more time and create more work than policing the forums does right now. Combine this with them having to come up with nominations regularly, make sure that the nominees actually
want to be mods (I know I, for one, want to have nothing to do with modship--I've been the admin of a big forum before, and I have no wish to do so again), keep an eye on voting to make sure nothing unkosher is happening ("vote this guy in for the lulz!" or "ugh, no way I'm going to be under this guy"), etc. . . . It would become a nightmare quickly.
EDIT: Not to mention, getting everyone who is modded familiar with the admin tools of the forum and making sure they don't break anything in the process, keeping track of who breaks what (because something WILL break), and making sure no sabotage happens . . . etc. etc.
Whilst I'm not against the deletion of new various nonsense It would be a shame to lose all the old stuff in there, how about a new (locked) forum called archives, or similar, containing the threads from before VN started going down hill. I can't remember the exact date but round about when the new forums came in would be a reasonable cut off point I think, maybe a little later.
Similarly: this would require them to go through, if not every thread, then most of the threads from early on, to figure out "where it started to go downhill." Then they would have to decide "does this topic have specific relevance, and are people likely to want to look at it again?" and then once that's done, they'll have to move each of such threads to a different subsection--after locking them--before nuking the rest. It would be nice if this wouldn't take a horrific amount of time, but sadly it does require a great deal of time and effort. If you want to preserve specific posts, then by all means--save them onto your computer, I have done so with threads that I loved in the past.
As for banning proxies--just remember that, to a server, a proxy looks EXACTLY like just a different computer connecting to the server. There's no useful way to tell if someone is using a proxy, unless you really want to start playing with slightly cutting edge physical-computer-identification techniques...which you don't.
I believe you can ban proxies via the methods they use by
altering your .htaccess file. It is always possible that I am wrong though, so if you would do me a little favor and look over that link (second section of the post) and see if there is anything wrong with it, I would be very much obliged. I have started blocking proxies on my personal site using this method due to some harassment issues I've been dealing with, so I depend a great deal on that script and I need to know if something will break it. Of course, if you don't have time or are otherwise not inclined to look over the link, I totally understand.