Kim,
Glad to hear that you are a moderator. Although it can be a challenge. I do a fair amount of the moderating here, and came up with the forum guidelines. We have a relatively strict moderation policy here, and I've had some solid experience dealing with the challenges of being a fair moderator. So I have some recommendations for you. I know this isn't exactly what you are asking for, but I thought it might help.
The first is really important in my eyes. You need some kind of forum guidelines. TruthAction didn't have them for quite some time. The result was frustrated moderators and frustrated users. If you start off with guidelines people might complain for a couple of days and then drop it. If you do it later, it can be a total mess. I used to post at 911blogger and then TruthAction about creating some guidelines. It didn't happen, and all the problems I pointed to simply got worse until both sites got frustrated enough to do what?...Create guidelines and deal with a fair amount of complaints.
We actually noticed a similar response to the declaration. People are hesitant to make these kinds of distinctions, wanting to create an open space in which people feel free to express themselves. And yet there are always people who will take advantage of our best intentions. The open and free approach very simply doesn't work. And surprisingly, the way to prevent people from feeling restricted, is to have a set of guidelines that everyone knows apply equally to everyone else.
When someone does something in your forum you object to, you can not appear to be making the rules up on the fly. You can't appear to be operating in a subjective manner, based on your opinions or biases. Every decision that you make as a moderator has to be based on a rule that you can point to directly. In other words, the guidelines provide you all the authority you will be utilizing in your role as moderator. Making these rules and your role totally explicit from the outset prevents a lot of disputes around your decisions.
You also have to maintain some kind of moderator discretion. That should be written into the guidelines. Something about you having the authority to take action based upon an overall picture of someone contribution. The reason this may be important is because some people, especially really savvy debunkers and trolls, are good at following the guidelines to the letter but not respecting their intent. Our guidelines state that people must respect both their letter and intent and this gives the moderators some flexibility to interpret the intentions of someone posting.
I think its important to be willing to delete off topic threads. So I think its good to set out what's on topic in your guidelines. You can warn people when they post something off topic, but then leaving the post up can be an unnecessary distraction. If you are going to delete a post its best to do so before others respond. But unless someone writes something very thoughtful, I usually erase them anyway. That can be a tough call, but I think one of the more important roles of the moderator is keeping the forum from becoming unproductive.
Banning people is the hardest thing to do. You will likely have to do this at some point. We aren't so keen on giving people second chances over here by temporarily deactivating their accounts. That's treating them like children, and I don't think it works. We have an informal three strikes rule here. If someone is obviously here to disrupt, we might ban them without discussion. But generally, when someone steps over the line, we post a "moderator comment" and let them know the manner in which they have violated the guidelines. If they keep doing the same thing, we know they aren't respecting the forum, and they have to go.
Finally, I think its important to have a specific way to deal with people's concerns about moderation itself. We tell people to post all concerns about moderation to the guidelines thread. I think you want to avoid letting concerns about moderation become a distraction.
There are other ways to handle all this. But in my experience, and from the positive feedback I've received, I think guidelines make moderation a lot more straight forward.