Forum Moderators: open
Actually, even moderators aren't exempt from pre-moderation. We have pre-moderation not to make sure that rules are followed, but primarily to reduce the noise in those highly trafficked forums. The main reasons as originally outlined by Brett [webmasterworld.com] for starting pre-moderation include:
1) Duplicate Content.
2) Privacy issues, promotional issues, and posts
3) Raves, Rants, Flames, Trolls, JuJu Beans.
4) Bad thread titles.
5) Personal issues with Google.
6) Off topic.
The key to remember is that premoderation was started over a year ago in the Google News forum because of our rapid growth and the number of people who were contributing similar ideas over and over again. Now, a year later, we have even more members in the Google News forum and so the repeats/dupes/already answered questions/non-issues are even more numerous.
The presence of premoderation of all posts in the applicable forums means that the quality of threads at WebmasterWorld stays as high as possible - and that is surely something that everyone will benefit from.