Redesigning a Forum

Given our long history of tolerance to people direuptively derailing topics, how would you design a forum to prevent this?

I will format this as a poll, simply because it would encourage input and format the topic. Only posts about designing a forum system are allowed. No name-calling, or reference to members by their names when making examples.

The following are a list of options that occurs to me immediately.

1. Threading. This is an old technique, where replies to a post go down a different path than the main discussion. This can be difficult to follow, and hard for a newbie to make heads or tails of. The "main" discussion becomes hard to find.

2. Give the topic starter the "power" to move posts into a "side track" thread. Put a little icon on the side of the post with the name of the person who tried to derail the discussion into something else. This becomes like a "hidden" topic addressed from the current topic. Anyone can follow the link (or see that it belonged to a troll and ignore it) and continue the discussion down that sideline if they like, or ignore the sideline and continue reading. People may deliberately take a post into a subtopic side-line. The top-level topic list could be a tree-view, in case anyone wants to directly participate in the side-discussions. A moderator might also promote a subtopic to top-level topic, as necessary.

3. The topic police. Long ago, and in other forums, the "topic police" have been dreaded. Of course, the garbage doesn't pile up, but so much judgment is called for that a topic police person will always be in the position where some people will claim a post really was "on topic".

4. Selective topic banning. When you create a topic, you may also elect to provide a list of people who specifically can not ever post to it. This puts the onus on the one who started the topic to pre-police it against known harrassers and trolls. If you know certain people will be likely to jump in and just carry on and immediately begin abusing others for their opinions, you can elect to make the topic for "anybody but these". Then the ineffective 'ignore list' becomes unnecessary, since certain people will almost always be ignored when topics are begun, and you can judge a topic "by its cover", since you know the worst cases on your own ignore list will never participate in any way. Naturally, the list of "who's pre-banned" is pasted on top of the opening post of the topic for all to see.

5. Just BAN disruptive people. This puts the onus right back on the proprietors to do something about people. But once again, too subjective. Too easy to paint the moderators as ogres.

6. It's just fine the way it is. Never change a thing.

7. Evildave, you idiot! All anyone needs to do is... (elaborate).