At this point, I think moderation would be a very useful tool for the community. The ability to end off-topic or offensive threads without commenting on them beyond "this topic is not appropriate here, so we are deleting/closing the thread" or "this was not appropriate in your post, please fix it" could help with a lot of messy situations. I'm unaware of any mailing lists with this capability (short of moderating every single message).
IANADD, but I am willing to commit time to work on a pilot project to create a moderated forum for Debian (in addition to the existing Debian fora). I know Sam mentioned that the Gnome project has had some success with discourse when I asked about something similar in a previous thread[1]. [1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2019/07/msg00140.html -- Eldon
