Andy, thanks for the vote of confidence, but to be honest, this board almost never needs "moderation" anyway. This one topic has caused more contention than we've had since I became a moderator. That said, the access that we were talking about would not have been for all Charter Members. To get access to the now-dead What's New section you would have to have been a current Charter Member and given (by an admin) membership in the "Developers" member group here. With both of those, you would have only been able to start a new thread in that section. Nobody but staff and above would be able to reply, and we would not have done that. The result would have been nothing but announcements with no replies to worry about.
So for now, threads that announce a new release will be stuck. As before, that thread can be posted by any member that can post here. In the past, freeware releases stayed up until there was no activity for seven straight days, or until it had been up for a reasonably long enough time, like 5-6 weeks. Payware was stuck for seven days period, since it was essentially free advertising. That time was, I believe, just three days in the FSX section since it's so much more active. And I mentioned "New Releases" - that means new scenery and flyable (or driveable) models. Repaints, updates, sales, etc. will stay up or slide down on their own merit. Freeware and Payware (we still have one or two independent FS9 payware dev's left) will be treated equally - stick for seven days. Public beta releases will be taken on a case-by-case basis, since the definition of "Beta" varies so greatly for different developers. The FSX section may vary slightly from this, but it should be pretty much similar.