I've been a mod/admin at decent sized community site/forums before. Not NeoGAF large certainly. I stopped throwing the position around after the second time I got ennobled?
One of them I got "fired" during a broad staff reshuffle because I had like 1/200th the number of bans as the other mods so the head guy assumed I wasn't doing "my job" even though the forum had this feature where mods/admins could put up a warning message that would come up the next time somebody logged in that they had to click ok on. I used this almost exclusively for regular/"known" users.
Like on GAF, I'd have to give Sculli/BobbyRoberts both a day ban or something in order to include the warning message. This just let you put the warning up. Then if the person wouldn't stop, etc.
Of course, for a lot of that I was only a teenager, so I didn't know any better.