totally understand that, I used to be a moderator on another forum from the start, good fun and was enjoyable, but due to lack of interest in hobby and due to work, redundancy x 3, money, life and children really, I had to give up.
Its a job you can only do when you have the time logged on and you also want to participate as well so can be difficult, luckily I could do a lot at the time and at work
What we did do was enrol forum helpers, so not so much of the big stuff but more of directing people, moving the odd topic and changing titles etc, merging similar topics into one to stop the double or triple topics, deleting duplicates, removing picrures from quoted replies and pointless one word posts etc....
what they didn't have was the power to block IPs and ban people etc, that was always done to the mods or admin
EDIT:
** remove pictures from posted replies added!