i'm gone for a few days, and look where it got the forum.
no, seriously, i have a comment on what rahvin said/the others replied.
i post on different types of forums, and whenever the one-liners/chit-chat etc. topic comes up i think of fictionalley.org. that's a large harry potter forum with thousands of users and a very strict moderation policy, probably needed exactly on account of the forum's huge popularity. not only do the moderators crack down hard on netspeak, lack of proper spelling and capitalization, and off-topicness; they also prohibit thread bumping, and they close threads that report information that's already been posted. this is sometimes pretty annoying, because it ends in a public scolding of sorts and there is also a system that keeps track of the reprimands, so that when users infringe the term of use for a certain number of times they get banned. on the other hand, it's probably the only way to keep a community of that size going without degenerating in a huge black mass (!) of chaos.
i also frequent a forum that has to do with the activities of the italian police, whose moderators are all cops, and it gives me yet another example of a possible moderation strategy. it's way smaller at around 200 users, and one-liners are tolerated, eventhough they're mostly kept to one specific thread. on the other hand, for obvious reasons there are strict rules against turning the forum into a posterboard for any political position: so threads that get political, which often happens, are regularly closed. as a rule, users are not banned even if they insist on wanting to sponsor a political side, but they are if they start flames more than once or if they insult other users in any way. also, the topic/post consistency is checked thoroughly and non-consistent posts are moved to the appropriate thread or section.
now, these two models are completely different, but they have something in common: they require the mods to set a very precise goal for themselves, and to work really hard at achieving it. they also result in 'clean' forums (for example, you will find no swearing on either of those forums, and notably no fights between users). but i don't think that this is necessarily the best model.
for a forum such as this one, which does not have twenty thousand users nor is meant to represent an institution, i really don't see the need for heavy moderation: there is a clear upside to all the chit-chat, ie i think we get to develop closer relationships with fellow users than it would be with one of the other models. in the fictionalley.org forums i really don´t know anything about my fellow forumers, because the discussion is very much on topic and even if you send pm's to people they generally are not that prone to reaching out. in the cops' forum, on the other hand, on average i know people better than i do on here, but that's because we're all from the same country and have had multiple occasions of meeting in real life; still, the human touch came into play the moment we exchanged mobile numbers and phoned/met each other, not on the forum. i still think that it's good to have a mode of interaction on an online board that allows people to know each other slightly better in a personal sense, and that's one of the reasons i like it here.
i don't even think the topics have been degenerating all that much: for example, bar the usual small spats, i think that the politics thread is a 'deep' one compared to most of the stuff you get in um. i agree that the chatting should be confined to this one thread, but i don't think it's reached unbearable levels.
