SweetiePie:Forgive me...but what was the question?
Indeed! 
I'll try & fish them out of the "editorial gem".
jakestanfill7: those of you [...] who dedicate [an] inordinate amount of time keeping the newbies in line on the forums
Seeing the mess in which these moderator-deprived forums are, it would not seem entirely fair to blame any forum user for trying to rectify the issue. As an illustration of the mess, my post explaining in detail why this forum needs moderators was deleted from this forum along with the entire thread to which it was sent, while flagrant abuses of the forum are sometimes ignored even after users report them via the Report Abuse link. Here is the deleted post I had made 4 days ago on the necessity of forum moderators; since I had spent quite a few minutes writing it, I made sure to make an offsite back-up of it, and here is the restored text:
Faterson: It's great that WGT is pretty quick to react to the
Report Abuse notifications they receive from this forum; they have successfully deleted/locked a few useless/offending posts/threads that way. (In the process, also deleted a few legitimate posts or prematurely locked a few threads discussing unresolved issues.) Those things appear to be happening in an "anonymous" fashion, however; the appearance is as if there is a forum admin in the background, making necessary steps in emergency situations when alerted to them. That is not the same thing as a standard
forum moderator, though. Among the most frequent tasks I need to perform elsewhere as a forum moderator are:
merging duplicate threads (a merge has never happened here so far, to my knowledge; perhaps the merging functionality is not available);
transferring incorrectly placed threads to the correct forum subsection (haven't seen that happen here either);
renaming threads with misleading titles (hasn't happened); etc., etc.
The typical moderation task for [a repetitive] thread would be to merge it with all the foregoing [duplicate] threads, or at least lock all the foregoing threads on the same topic & only keep [the new thread] alive, and not to allow any duplicate threads on the same issue to be created in future. That's a hell of a task 
One needs a full-blooded moderator for that, rather than just an emergency admin in the background; and I'd hate to see such tasks imposed on [...] any single person. Some users have volunteered for WGT to act as forum moderators and perhaps WGT will entrust them with those moderation tasks later on. That is a tricky thing, though; an inexpert moderator can do more harm than good in a forum, and might mess up its database. One of the things a forum admin must therefore do on a daily (if not hourly) basis, are forum database backups in case anything goes wrong with volunteer moderators. In short, it will take some time for WGT to take the right steps regarding forums moderation; and there are quite a number of bugs regarding forum functionality, too, most notably the unavailability of the Quote & Preview buttons when composing replies, etc., etc.
In reply to this, the user sabbath270 posted a link to the Wikipedia definition of forum moderators, which seems to confirm that the WGT forums, indeed, currently lack moderators. At some later point in time, this entire discussion got deleted by an anonymous forum admin without warning: all the posts by myself & sabbath270 regarding this. Yes, the posts were sent to an originally redundant thread, but once forum users send carefully worded replies to a thread, the correct moderating response is not to delete those users' posts blindly & wholesale, but to lock that thread.
jakestanfill7: what makes ALL of you WGTers tick?
As to me, this game and the forums serve as relaxation away from work.
jakestanfill7: some of the most "helpful" individuals in the forums have yet to achieve the upper echelon of WGT achievement, the Masters Tier.
You need to practice a lot if you want to become a "master" at anything. I tried to learn to play the piano and had to give it up, seeing as I had not enough time for practice. The same applies to this golf game: I don't have enough time to practice to be able to advance to the Master tier.
jakestanfill7: is time better served by selfless posts for the betterment of others or polishing your skills as a virtual golfer?
This question does not really exist, unfortunately. You need a lot more time for playing a round of golf than for firing off a few quick forum replies. If anyone is being too obnoxious in the forums, I suppose his/her fellow users will let him/her know, perhaps WGT will let him/her know as well, and then that person will perhaps leave the site for good & find a different form of entertainment more akin to their taste. 