I would ask them to assess their role as a member, and that is to nicely make suggestions for improvement, and not to run around yelling/demanding. What would you do if your forum became a hot-spot for some heated discussion and you gained a lot of popularity over the whole ordeal, but many of your members were upset about some of the posting, and threatened to leave?
I would ask the older members what problems they had with the post being made. If they violated the posting rules, infracture the posters and let that system deal with it. If the post were ok by forum rules, kindly inform the older members that censoring speech on the forum was a sure formula for disaster and ask if they had any ideas. Member who is valued for his services but there are other similar to him. He breaks a sig rule and is quite disrespectful when asked to change it saying other members also have violated rules in signature (though not that rule). What would you do?
give him a warning just as you would with any other member, if hes being disrespectful to staff. what would you do if one of your mods went crazy and started deleting everything
Remove mod, restore backup database from 1 night ago As far as my above case, it happened. He left the site, created his own, and it runs pretty strong. A lot of members of the 1st site are also members of the second site. What would you do if someone "stole" (ripped a copy) of your site and hosted it off-shore where the host didn't care about a DCMA notice?
add extra features and try and make my forum even better than theirs! what if a member of your forum and one of your rivals started a fight on facebook or another forum, and one of your most respected members sided with your rival and started mentioning things posted on a private section of your forum
Remove access to the forum and ask the member that is fighting with the rival to stop. What would you do if you have ads up on the forum (and that's what pays the bills) and all your members started complaining about it and started leaving (I've had this issue and I think I handled it well, but curious what others would do)
make an alt and remind those members of ad-block... I'm just kidding, don't take my response as serious...