Let me provide the history of moderation on this forum and Speculation as I experienced it:
Until summer and the
Forum moderation policy (which ironically many objected against in the beginning, too), there was hardly any moderation at all by the few Admins. One year ago, even Silk Road could post on this forum and advertise its business.
Now as the market went parabolic and the forum became crowded with spammers and trolls, the situation was hardly sustainable anymore, so finally, volunteer mods were promoted and instructed to take care of it. It was also an effort to combat the image it gave to people (for example businessmen) who were repelled from Bitcoin due to its community. The image damage went so far that the Bitcoin Forum was removed from the bitcoin.org domain and on the frontpage it now links to a Google search to distance the project from this forum.
Most often, the spam and trolls consisted of people who liked to create threads consisting of "CRASH SELL SELL SELL"; this is indicated in sirius’s second point. As a reaction to the crap that persisted to plague the forums, the Speculation section was created in July to contain it. Here is one of the oldest threads exemplifying this well:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=28317.0So, here we are now, with me appointed to take care of the recently neglected Speculation forum. As I have stated, I fully intend to keep intact the lax and laissez faire style of this subforum, and having you (Mushoz, I’m looking at you) judge it after two days and hardly any moderation at all is inadequate.
In case this disturbs you too much to bear this forum, I refer to my previous post here in this thread.