Thanks Brendan, there was an temporary eerieness about these forums over the hours following the 1984 announcement.
If the approval system did make a return, may I suggest a simple rating or
karma system? For example, each user starts out with a karma of 0, and next to each post there are two buttons, one labelled - and another labelled +, with a number next to it representing the poster's overall karma, and the post's specific karma. If you find a post useful, you can click + to increase their karma. Alternatively, if a post is off topic, feeding a troll, or offensive, you can click - to decrease their karma (which may result in it being negative). A user can only perform this action once per poster per hour.
If your karma is >1 (not 0 or lower) your post does not require moderator approval.
In most cases, you're not going to rate the karma of every post you read, only the exceptionally helpful posts will result in positive karma, yet slightly offensive posts will result in bad karma. Therefore one bad post may require a lot of good posts to make up for it. If your karma falls below 1, it's not the end of the world, since you can still post (your posts just require approval).
I believe this will encourage people to think twice before asking questions and posting answers, or starting flame wars. Even if it doesn't, only those users will be the ones requiring their posts to be moderated, therefore it's no worse of than the 1984 system anyways.