It all comes down to adapting to your environment. A few years back, I was the leading Moderator for another forum, and I managed to keep the place going for about two years after the guy that set up the forum, aswell as all but one other moderator abandoned it.
Sounds like you had your way of dealing with such. When I was Staff Member with the ability to ban people and moderate even outside my section (higher than moderator and close to admin as a rank), I think I made the place better. I was in charge for the entire War3 section of Battleforums that had also CS, SCBW, D2 and now SC2 places (now the place is a graveyard with spambots and empty - the future of THW seen there?) - the forum supported Hacks but when I took the position - I DELETED the Hacks section of War3, I organized tournaments where we gather to play together, I dealt with bad members by warning them then Temp Ban, if they continued - perma ban. Now most of the problems I had were spammers and some who wanted hacks - I IP banned such directly, almost never had to deal with behavior.
The ideas about dealing with behavior came as a result of my little stay at TeamLiquid:
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FORMULA
You break the rules - you get a warning
2 warnings result in a weekly ban
Avoiding the weekly ban with a new account or breaking the rules after having one or two weekly bans - perma ban
You know how good that works? People don't dare if they care to use the forums. So the formula of warnings and bans remains the same, the question is when to give warnings? Well, in cases such as:
- Offending a member or trolling - you get 1 warning
- Threads such as 'Your MAMA SO FAT jokes', 'Dolan thread' 'Spam thread' 'Silly word games thread' 'Silly MEME thread', 'Troll science' thread, Completely Pointless thread, - LOCKED -
you get a warning for not thinking twice before making so stupid threads
- any other rules such as stealing models, not giving credit, spamming and such dealt with a warning or temp ban as you decide
Allowed: Favorite Song/Movie, Anime thread, Pony thread, a single TV show thread - why not?
Now it sounds like as if you're in military right? It's called learning
discipline. Fun? It's a myth, not in this retarded way at least.
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Just my defnition of making a place better, anywhere