My two cents:
rant on

Look, I don't like having a lot of rules either and I cringe every time we have to create/apply another one. No one wants this site to become another ARFCOM.

When I became a mod last year I was able to go in an clean up the few issues and then get into the rest of the site and enjoy it.

Around last December we started to see 2 things happening here on the site and by the end of January of this year things were reaching a critical peak - at least for the Mods/Admins of the site. First, we started seeing an explosion of new members. Secondly, we started seeing more and more problems in the Trading Post forums requiring Moderator intervention. Most of these issues were identified by louder and louder complaints from our membership. One might think that the first thing is completely responsible for the second but in reality the new members were just part of the problem. By this point I noticed that all of the free time I had to enjoy the site was used up playing moderator - I couldn't enjoy the site. By initiating the requirements for everyone to have their location in their profile and anyone creating a post in the Trading Post forums to read & ack the site rules, the burden on the moderator staff droppped significantly.

However, once again the problems started to grow. We added to our moderator staff to help alleviate the workload. With the great choices made in this staff it made an impact - for a while.

By June I was totally burned out and took about a 10 day hiatus from the site. The constant moderation demands had taken a toll. When I returned I was refreshed and ready to resume my role. NOT ONE of the mod/admin staff gets anything for our efforts except the joy of keeping this the best stop on the Information Superhighway. It is a labor of love. Even still, the only times this summer I was able to peek out of the Trading Post to participate in the rest of the site were days I had to put aside being a moderator and just enjoy the site as a member - leaving the burden to administer the site to the rest of the team. I'm an assigned moderator on many forums outside of the Trading Post and have been having to ignore those forums because there just isn't time to see to them.

Now, we've just added to our mod staff again with more awesome assets but unless we implemented some additional rules it just wouldn't be enough. As of noon today we had 5194 members here. We've got a mod/admin team of less than 10 active members who manage:
Quote Originally Posted by Site Stats From Aug 21 - Sep 20, 2011
Between 39 and 75 new threads daily
Between 450 and 939 new posts daily
Between 583 and 691 members visiting daily
As few as 1 and as many as 10 new member registrations/day
Sometimes as many as 5 spam members/day which we have to root out and often remove their spam posts
This information is based off of site statistics for the past month alone - sometimes these numbers SURGE!

Don't the mods/admins deserve to enjoy this site like the rest of the members and not just spend all of their time administering it? Without adding a couple more rules to our minimal site rules/requirements it just wouldn't be possible. While we are grateful for everyones appreciation of our efforts, we could sure use your help in following the rules and alerting us to issues early on and your understanding as well.

/rant