Hm.I totally agree! What has happened here is very distressing.
I've been scanning the thread and, once in a great while, adding some info-or-other. Honestly, I haven't noticed too much of a change.. except there is a fair amount of negativity.
But, if the FUDsters and bots are at it, well, this wouldn't be the first time: They collectively did in the Tesla Forums over at tesla.com some years back.
The difference between there and then and here and now is the existence of moderators. Tesla famously didn't really moderate their forums. Although they did take a couple of whacks of doing it with some form of moderation.
But what I keep on noting is the number of posts (not large) claiming that the moderators are being corrupted. Somehow. And that everything is going to pot. Hmm..
I wonder if this is a concerted effort by the trolls/bots/paid-for-trolls to delegitimize the forum as a source of reliable information. I mean, consider AIDs, the virus: It infects the immune system which, once it's dead, allows other opportunistic infections, that normally wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in a warm place, to kill the infected person.
I therefore suspect that there's not that many trolls around.. but they may be changing tactics.
If the above is true (for a given value of true), the obvious cure is for the moderators to (a) not lose heart and (b) do what they normally do, without fear or favor.
As far as going for a model where Not Everybody Gets To Post Immediately.. Well, that was done back on good old NetNews, back in the day. There were news forums where each and every post had to be approved by a select number of moderators. Said forums were notably free of spam (invented on NetNews, by Cantor & Seigel!) and the whackier members of the tin-foil-hat wearing public. The problem is, of course, that the number of posts tends to drop, and not all of those posts are of the spammy variety.