The moderated AMD thread there is another great example. There are definitely threads there that run better simply because they're moderated. It depends, more than anything else, on who's moderating and how they're doing it. In that board's case, it was likely simply the exclusion of Paul Engel (an INTC perma-bull and AMD perma-bear with a sometimes nasty demeanor) that resulted in lot of good give and take.
The same tool that has resulted in some great threads there has also been misused at least as often.
I remember when Voltaire's Porch had to go the moderated route because of lots of harassment from people who, though they had little to offer in the way of insightful market commentary, were convinced that the Porchers were bad people and had to be exposed as such at every turn. Once it went Moderated, the antagonists started their own "Porch" thread(s) and promptly excluded everyone who didn't share their view. A war that was previously confined to one thread spread to a number of threads, many of which seemed unrelated at face value, but were dragged into it because some of their participants were on the anti-porchers' bad-guy list.
Personally, I prefer that all the negative aspects of public interaction be dealt with by an Admin appropriately rather than trying to solve the problem with software, but I've also seen the good that can result from software intervention/enabling. I just dislike the bad that can also come from it.
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