For moderation, I generally prefer chaos over oppression.  Sure there's some unchecked hostility, but if you crank up the moderation then the abuse just shifts towards the tattle-tail side of the spectrum.  The new way to bully people is to provoke them until they violate the rules, then report them.  You can see this a lot of games that attempt to be "kid friendly".  Also I don't even read 1% of the posts on the forum, so if something doesn't get reported then it doesn't get moderated - and people don't seem to report general richardery. 
If you compare the forum to any other group of unsupervised teenagers, it's actually quite peaceful.  If you leave a real life classroom alone for a few hours the kids will physically assault each other.  There have been some remarkably successful threads - like that pixel art choose your own adventure that someone made which now I can't find.  Even controversial topics like #banbossy had some rational discussion with only a few trouble makers.