Well, I would like to add some thoughts gained from my own experience in taking part in online forums and seeing how long-term moderators responded to problems:
The problem is twofold. There is the troll, and there is the inexperience of the moderators.
A forum moderator is a kind of educational authority. If you state that if somebody continues his offensive behaviour he will have to face consequences and you don't actually take the measures when he does not honour your request, you won't be taken seriously and your authority will become void. It's like with pets and children.
Barring strong personal insults, forum users tend to not file a complain with the moderators but to leave silently or in a huff instead. Anyway, they are gone and the offender is still there, able to inflict further damage. Thus, to avoid harm being done by an offender, moderators cannot wait for a complaint to be filed offcially if they come across offensive behaviour.
Harm includes any kind of invalidating the platform for the intended use, and that includes continous thread-hijacking and the like.
A policy for handling offenders needs to be agreed upon by the moderators when taking their job. That way, there's a lot less to discuss from the start and it reduces the need to hold a vote considerably. Usually, a vote shouldn't be required other than for the ultimate measure of an unlimited ban.
The voting issue is a point where I have to
strongly disagree with Thomas. Exercising your rights as a moderator without consulting the others has nothing to do with "crappy egoism." As a moderator you need to have a certain faith in your fellow moderators in the first place. You have to believe that they will do their job correctly.
I can see two exception from that rule: One is when a new moderator joins the staff. If you don't know him well enough, you can place him under supervision for a certain time. If you don't trust him enough after that, you cannot let him join permanently. The other is dealing with the language barrier. Many fights are caused by misunderstandings, and moderators are not immune to that. So it's a good idea to ask the others if they do find statements offensive as well before taking any action. Now, if you feel that a fellow moderator is abusing his rights, that's a completely different pair of shoes.
Anyway, even if nobody asked for it, I'll give this advice:
- To quote Theodore Roosevelt: "Walk softly and carry a big stick."
- Walk the talk.
- Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.
Related to the moderation of a forum, this means:
- If somebody breaks the rules, warn him. Since we are all humans, that stage is likely to happen to many of us once in a while. Also, somebody might not really be aware of the fact that he's breaking the rules.
- If he does not honour the request, warn him a second time and place him under moderation if the forum software allows that, i.e., all posts by this person will have to be approved by a moderator until further notice. If he does behave, turn off moderated mode again.
- If he deliberately continues to break the rules, ban him. Depending on what has happened and the person's reaction, you might consider placing a ban for a finite time only.