These last two posts are flip sides of the same argument. There are two kinds of whingers about moderation here:
1) The forum has gone to hell, it's all a mess, full of text speak, illiterate fools and idiotic off topic posts. Ban them all!
2) Relax, I want to do my thing.
I can't do both. None of the mods can. What can we do? We can make this place a good Juve site, and we can make it a good online community. There's a balance to be had between those two.
For a good Juve site, you want news threads to stay on topic. Off topic posts make it hard to find information, hard to hold a conversation about a topic you want discussed. Fights and other crap like that are also detrimental.
For a good online community, people have to be able to shoot the breeze, post random shit, chat. That means keeping spam and trolling to a minimum. And yes, a group of idiots ganging up on a new guy, or some punter whose English is so-so, or just someone they don't like, is trolling. Those cliques make it tough to attract and keep new members, and as we lose older members (some of them sick of morons fighting), it makes the forums that bit duller, for all the instant entertainment it seems to bring some.