(Obligatory disclaimer - this is not legal advice, you should use a qualified lawyer for that, this is merely commentary)
[re. moderating user comments]
It's not nonsense. The website I work for does exactly this, for exactly this reason, and so do many others. What do you think a 'moderated' comment section is?
The website you work for may wish to consider obtaining specialist legal advice. Pre-moderation can work, but it absolutely is not a duty, and in fact by pre-moderating comments you may be opening yourself up to legal attack.
If you pre-moderate comments, you are accepting responsibility for their content - if something libellous gets through you are therefore very much in the firing line.
If on the other hand you do not pre-moderate - in the UK at least, although I believe these regulations are based on EU directive - you can claim a defence of being a 'mere conduit' that does not accept responsibility for third party comments. See Section 17 of the E-Commerce Regulations 2002:
17.—(1) Where an information society service is provided which consists of the transmission in a communication network of information provided by a recipient of the service or the provision of access to a communication network, the service provider (if he otherwise would) shall not be liable for damages or for any other pecuniary remedy or for any criminal sanction as a result of that transmission where the service provider—
(a)did not initiate the transmission;
(b)did not select the receiver of the transmission; and
(c)did not select or modify the information contained in the transmission.
(2) The acts of transmission and of provision of access referred to in paragraph (1) include the automatic, intermediate and transient storage of the information transmitted where:
(a)this takes place for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission in the communication network, and
(b)the information is not stored for any period longer than is reasonably necessary for the transmission.
and also Section 19:
19. Where an information society service is provided which consists of the storage of information provided by a recipient of the service, the service provider (if he otherwise would) shall not be liable for damages or for any other pecuniary remedy or for any criminal sanction as a result of that storage where—
(a)the service provider—
(i)does not have actual knowledge of unlawful activity or information and, where a claim for damages is made, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which it would have been apparent to the service provider that the activity or information was unlawful; or
(ii)upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove or to disable access to the information, and
(b)the recipient of the service was not acting under the authority or the control of the service provider.
By pre-moderating, you give yourself prior knowledge of the content (eliminating a Hosting defence: if your pre-moderating process is intended to identify libellous material, it
ipso facto means you should be aware of all the relevant facts and circumstances around the legality of the content, otherwise your pre-moderating process is a farce,) and you also 'select or modify' content (eliminating the Mere Conduit defence.)
In my experience, insurers have been very wary of providing indemnity insurance to pre-moderated message boards for this very reason.
You absolutely
should have a process for promptly removing any potentially infringing content in response to a complaint, however.