I'm dealing with this on a need-to basis, and the site has become big enough (660 members at the last count) and active enough that we need to talk moderation. I have had a number of offers from people who were mods at DPReview to come and moderate here. There were many really good moderators on DPReview, who did their unpaid job diligently and with sympathy and discretion, and there were a few that seemed to want to play 'bad cop', without the good cop. That's the people, but I always thought that the whole site's attitude to moderation was wrong headed. They started off without very clear rules and principles, and then made it even worse with the infamous 'be nice' policy. One of the tell-tale signs that it wasn't right was that members weren't allowed to discuss moderation - what would you think about a country that didn't allow discussion of its policing?
Anyway, we do need moderation and we do need effective moderation, but we need moderation that is not high handed and oppressive to the membership. So I started this thread mainly for people to tell us about their experience with DPReview, the good and the bad, and maybe at the end we can condense it down and come up with some basic principles that we can operate to.