The best way to curtail that is the "Report" button... it's not that the section needs to be "no moderators" it's that it has to be "no moderator intervention" The way we always did it was, staff can say whatever they want, but unless the thread/post violates the core rules (in your example, violence or racism) they couldn't intervene. We always had exceptions for if someone got WAY over the line, we'd trash the thread (leaving the redirect link) and then PM the complainer/poster saying it was trashed, keep it clean or take a timeout. That's actually surprising! I know GF cost us close to a few thousand a year, and then when we acquired FilesNetwork the cost went up a ton, but advertising also went up... problem is forum could never exist on it's own Right, but since it was split rather than deleted with link, noone knows it. So it's very easy to say "hey where the hell did that one post go?" then inadvertently get into a "WHO THE HELL IS TOUCHING STUFF". That's why I always went with the "if it's not bannable material, don't touch it..." and if it WAS bannable, we always left the posts/people as an example For a while we were editing posts and putting "Hey I'm a douchebag and this post got me banned" but it took too much time lol.