We the Staff took a fairly hands off approach As we figured people here were rational adults and could self Moderate their behavior. To discuss ideas, politics and whatever under the sun to their hearts content in a civil manner. This was perhaps naive but we felt we had to try.
You tend to think the best of people. That's probably a good trait to have if you need to risk your neck to save someone else's. Yes it was a bit naive, but so is the belief that you've done a bad job. The US is going through a collapse of its 80 year long political institution. The four major factions are at each other's throats (Far Right/Right/Left/Far Left). And we're going through a presidential election.
Honestly, given what I've seen on other sites, things here are going remarkably well.
But this has clearly not been the case. And we the Staff didn't catch numerous violations of the rules as we dont actively patrol the forums looking for problems, and so much of the contentious content simply flew under our Radar. So obviously people have been taking advantage of the situation. But this also disturbs me that quite a few others have seen this, knew it was wrong and didnt report it either. So now we make a course correction and lay down the law.
Your commitment to supporting the site is why you are where you are, but I would suggest that the reason why these rule violations happened without report is probably more down to people agreeing with you. Most of the members here probably don't feel the need to patrol the forums looking for problems. And unless presented with a post leveled at someone else on the forum (ie, an actual attack), most people are probably not even going to think twice about it.
You should also be aware that a lot of times, people skim posts that are too long, poorly put together, or comes from posters who they generally don't read, perhaps because they rarely have anything useful to say. So a lot of the time, people who post stupid or unhelpful things tend to get overlooked. We've seen this problem before.
Don't mistake my meaning here. We are not about to become Jackboot authoritarians. But we are not going to tolerate the flagrant violation of our rules either. The responsibility for this state of affairs lies with us and we accept that responsibility. Now we fix it.
I think the real issue is getting everyone on the same page. My guess is that most people probably won't report anything unless it's well past the line, such as directed at another site member or very explicit in their descriptions, but maybe there's some examples we could get of when we should get a moderator involved?