Admin Technology
Admin is a huge ongoing cost of any large community.
This is an idea that dates back to the early days of muds, once a user "beat" the game they became a god who then went on to possibly expand the game or just help and moderate the new users with their ascended powers.
What's being attempted here is a system whereby the users slowly ascend and moderate each other. See I Wanna Be Admin and the Admin Game for more details on how this works. Remember that if this is not 100% successful, even if its only 1% successful, it is still going to be a real saving over moderating everything by hand as server traffic increases.
Having a full always on fully moderated server is incredibly costly, some places that are aimed primarily at kids bill themselves as fully moderated. This should actually be viewed more of a baby sitting service than anything else. Personally I don't think I could even add 1000 new swear word filters a day (crazy kids) even if I tried and it certainly wouldn't be a very constructive use of my time.
By using this alternative system which encourages self control and community action we reward users for sticking around with power over the other users but limit this power such that it cannot be overly abused. Yes this is a hard to achieve balancing act that is impossible to get perfectly right. However even if it is only slightly successful it can still be a big saving. More so, it is designed to be fun. So even when it falls short of its primary goal it can still succeed in this.
The main design is that of a public / private areas. Everyone has their own room where they have absolute control. Any moderation applied by other users will only apply to public rooms, everyone can always just escape to their own room and have people visit them there. By this simple design no matter what goes on in public you still have your own space that you control.
The public areas are chaotic by their nature, any mild taming of this is a success but I do feel that with what I have now I could leave for a year come back and the place will still be ticking along by itself just fine.