I feel like two things contribute to the way we view certain things when it comes to board moderation. One is culture overtime just generally shifts. When people are used to Discord for instance, discussions will start at one place and up completely somewhere different. And if you’re trying to compete with that you can’t be more strict than where people are more natural to have their conversations.
Forum culture is also drastically different in general. This isn’t the old days when forums were incredibly popular. There’s maybe three Wrestling Forums in existence right now that have any kind of daily active usage when back in the day forums had a litany of really strict rules that they would enforce, because they were trying to keep up the pretense of having the most well structured well moderated best forum out there because if its members didn’t like the way it was they could go to nine other places.
I mean there were rules on double posting, how long a Post had to be, couldn’t bump older threads, Post count restrictions and then like half the forum, if they didn’t feel the topics were worthy of having a Post counted towards your count, wouldn’t count as a post, and all kinds of weird stuff that we just don’t do anymore.