What would you do if you were a forum moderator?

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I moderated a forum once years ago. It was a god forsaken task. People tended to disagree with each other and it sometimes got personal between them. Where do you draw the line with a flame war? If you delete one persons post but not the other then you are accused of taking sides. However if you moderate too hard then that annoys everyone. It is often hard to say that one person or the other started a flame war because there is just a gradual escalation from a civilised disagreement to a full blown flame war. All you can do is delete the thread or posts and warn the posters not to continue. The other problem is off topic posting. This doesn't seem to be so much of a problem with wp, but with a topic based forum where do you draw the line - people tend to drift off on to other topics, it is human nature, but without some sort of restrictions it just becomes a chat forum.

One thing I do know. If a forum is heavily moderated people leave and the forum dies. I know one in particular that claims to have tens of thousands of members but in reality only has around 50 active at any one time. People get fed up with their posts being deleted for trivialities and just stop visiting or posting to the forum after a few months.

I Would ban every troll who registers in my forum by their I.P. address.

Banning by IP address is not effective for people who use dial up. My I.P. address changes several times a day. There is also the danger of banning an innocent who subsequently picks up that I.P. address. Enforcing effective bans is not easy.