An unspoken problem with the boards and the moderators:

Firstly, this is nobody's fault. I'm not trying to blame the moderators, or the users for this.

I've noticed a few cases where players come head to head with moderators, and the situation always gets ugly. The player makes biased and angry posts / comments about the moderators, and due to their inflamatory nature and lack of good reasoning, the moderators will delete said posts. Then the users make more posts accusing the moderators of worse dictatorship. I remember a few user got themselves completely banned due to this.

I'm curious if the moderators have discussed the idea of de-escalation much yet? It seems like a better route than the heavy handed approach, since the users tend to react even worse, seeing any post removal or punishment as confirmation bias that the moderators are dictators.

I understand that you aren't dictators, and that you're just trying to do your jobs, but I think your jobs would be easier to do if you de-escalate situations more.