Look at the Netscape message boards...one of the top five most active/popular message boards is (you guessed it) EvC...and it's been there for over 3 years. They dropped board monitors over two years ago...and since then;
1)Things go waaay off topic and naturally come back on topic eventually.
2)Trolls are taken care of by the posters by ignoring them.
3)There is occasional foul and disgusting language and
proposals...posters take care of it by ignoring it.
4)New posters aren't intimidated by a monitor with warnings and a
death key.
From what I've seen, boards with NO control provide just as good a service (it even seems better) as boards with relentless authoritative controls....what do they call it?..."topic control measures"?