I deal with this every day, since I run a community of opinionated teenage band geeks, which can be worse than any technical forum I've seen. My approach is th

I deal with this every day, since I run a community of opinionated teenage band geeks, which can be worse than any technical forum I've seen. My approach is that if you want the community to grow in the right direction, you have to keep pruning the bad stuff. So my main tool has been ruthless deletion. There's no convoluted point system to distract from the conversation with endless tweaking, meta-discussion, and arguments about being downvoted. There is also one big ban button for the mods -- no reputation or warning system. I just rely on their judgment. We have occasionally banned new members just for having terrible attitudes. Sometimes we try to talk it out first, but often it's not worth the time. Maybe this only applies to younger users, but I've found that you have to toss out the bad apples as early as possible, because their attitudes will spread. As a result, I've been called a dictator a few times (justifiably), and there have been a few bruised egos, but everyone else raves about how great the community is. Right now there is a civil discussion about Opera vs Broadway, and a thread with over 100 posts giving kudos to one another about their accomplishments, which was started by a regular user, not me. Many banned members apologize and beg to be let back in, but I have learned to say no, because they relapse. Some have even threatened me, but I would rather have those people complaining loudly about how much of a jerk I am, than to have my best members silently leave because the site has gone downhill (though some people will say that no matter what you do). Anyway, maybe that approach won't work in a place like this, but I believe that if you have a strong opinion about how a community should behave, don't screw around trying to be "fair" or clever. Just pick a bunch of people that share the same opinion and let them aggressively prune the bad stuff.