Well, one thing that I appreciate here is that as long as people play nice, the moderators generally seem to let discussions develop naturally--even organically, you might say--and move in whatever direction they just happen to develop and move in. Someplace else (ahem) I've seen moderators jump in and wrench a discussion back to whatever the thread title just happens to be. I suppose that's an equally valid approach to moderating, but I find it sort of ... constraining.
I can see the benefits of both styles of moderation. If you are trying to find a specific piece of information in a thread and a thread suddenly changes course, it might make sense to "moderate" it. But around here, we usually write the participants and let them know we'd like to split the thread into two independent topics as opposed to dropping a hammer. We also never delete posts unless they are in serious violation of our personal attack rule. If a topic goes completely into another world, it can make it very hard to people to find things.
One thing that is very different about this forum as opposed to the ones I've been involved with before is that most of our people are reticent about starting new topics -- they prefer to reply to existing ones. That is very unusual. Now I know on some other forums, you have to earn your stripes to be even permitted to start a new topic, but BetterMost has been a real learning experience for me as well in watching how these discussions develop. And because that is the tendency here, the threads tend to develop organically as you said. Because that is what the community has grown comfortable with, that is what we do here.
The truth is, this is the first forum I've been involved with where women are writing in equal numbers (if not more so) than the men are, and that is VERY VERY unusual to see online. I think this comes from the fact that we are extremely friendly and welcoming to new people, we do not allow personal attacks of any kind, and we are very hands-off about trying to control things. I'm also thrilled to have a great team of moderators here that have been told to make their respective forums their own. Ellemeno, who is my co-admin here, has written more messages than I do, and probably knows more about what is going on here than I do.
If you look at my own 'profile' of activity here, you'll find I've comfortably found my niche as master topic starter, having probably opened more new topics than anyone, as well as probably writing more messages that people 'consume' but don't feel any particular need to reply to. That's my journalistic streak coming through - convey information to people without necessarily being too conversational about it. But most of my work here is behind the scenes in developing the site and taking care of things around here that people don't necessarily see. Since I am not a control-freak kind of guy, it's not surprising that I run into people who write me (or even met me in Alberta) who had no idea I even started the site. And that's fine with me.
The only thing I feel I have not done as well with is pushing our forming agenda here - to help people move within and out of AND BEYOND the story. There are still a lot of people here who I believe could do well with a more formal and structured approach at self-improvement, fighting depression, and achieving more happiness. These are goals that need not only community support, but some steps and advice people can follow. There are folks out there who need more than nice thoughts to get moving forward (I was one myself). In the early days of the site, I tried a more formal approach with some motivational exercises and advice to help people make some changes, but it didn't garner much response. Now I'm never sure if that was because my writing style often doesn't suggest people need to reply or if such a structured approach just wasn't going to work here. But it may be time to revisit that, because we certainly have built a much bigger community than we were back in February of 2006.