I'm still not clear on what Sciforums' management wants the board to be. Who do they want to market Sciforums to?
On one hand, there's the desire to increase traffic. On the other, there's the desire that this be a science discussion board. The obvious difficulty there is that the general public doesn't typically know very much about science.
Sciforums is facing the same difficulties that usenet faced in the early days of the internet. At first the unmoderated usenet groups were populated mostly by engineers. Scientists flocked to them and we saw sci. groups devoted to particular experiments or to specialized technical issues, with researchers around the world posting back and forth.
Then the internet started appealing to a broader market, became trendy and 'alternative' (remember 'cyberculture'?) and the alt. hierarchy blossomed. We started seeing the scientists and engineers' groups invaded by people off the street who lacked any specialized training in the subject that the group was discussing but with more than enough attitude to make up for that lack.
Even one persistent crank or troll can totally ruin an unmoderated discussion group. So the professionals started to leave, migrating to moderated discussion lists whose participants had to be pre-approved (that often meant being a professional or a graduate student in the subject) and where disruptive individuals could easily be removed. I'm not sure how professional scientists communicate with each other on the internet today, but they obviously do. (I expect that one of the things that today's university students in the sciences learn is where to find that stuff.)
I don't think that it's realistic to position Sciforums as a site for professional scientists or for advanced university students in the sciences. It would probably be up against some very established competition. Trying to attract professionals is probably beyond the realm of possibility.
The other extreme doesn't look all that attractive either, at least to me. That's the anything-goes option that Sciforums seems to be currently taking. Allowing anyone to post essentially anything in any thread turns Sciforums into effectively the same thing that the unmoderated usenet became, and the result is going to be the same: the lowest-common-denominator devolution of the board (except without all the spam this time). We'll just end up with little more than endless flame-battles and inanities, which is what some threads are right now.
Perhaps a middle ground is possible between these extremes, by positioning Sciforums as a board for secondary-level science students, students in introductory university level classes and preeminently for the kind of interested laypeople who read Discover or New Scientist.
So how could Sciforums attract these kinds of individual?
First, the board needs suitable content. Simply waiting for board participants to provide it isn't going to work if the board isn't already populated by the kind of individual that Sciforums wants to attract. The pump needs to be primed.
That suggests that Sciforums needs more moderators with some academic background in the subjects they are moderating. (A degree would be nice.) Perhaps moderators should behave more like the discussion facilitators in oneline university classes: starting topical threads, throwing out questions, providing necessary background and, yes, heading off cranks and nipping flame-battles in the bud.
If Sciforums opts to go that way, it will discover that the role of discussion-facilitator is going to be a lot harder on an open discussion board than in a university class. (Harder, not easier.) Participants won't all be on the same page, listening to the same lectures and reading the same text. Many laypeople can't help behaving like cranks when they try to reason creatively about science, since they lack the necessary understanding of why the mainstream thinks as it does. So the moderators need to be able to help them come up to speed, explaining scientific principles that some moderators might not totally understand themselves.
If this vision of Sciforums is going to work, the moderators need to behave more like teachers, very good teachers who can teach in a friendly and unthreatening way, without the slightest hint of condescension, so that board participants experience the joy of learning without even really being aware that they are being taught. The way to do that is probably to just make good posts. Missing context and necessary background can be introduced in the shape of one's own contributions to a thread without directly challenging anybody.
There's also the obvious problem of when and how to cut off combative, recalcitrant or frankly bizarre people (Sciforums has quite a few of those) and perhaps banish them down to the 'Alternative' fora. That's going to require quite a bit of finesse.
Is it possible to adjust the board software so that individuals can be banned (temporarily or permanently) from the science fora while still being allowed to post down in alternative?
My suggestion is to keep the alternative theories forum and to maintain a pretty much anything-goes policy down there. If somebody thinks that Einstein was an idiot, let them expound to their heart's content in alternative. Maybe step in to stop the more over-the-top flame-battles, but allow just about any kind of content: PSI, UFOs, ghosts and spirits, religious creationists... Everyone should all be able to argue their case down there, however 'unscientific' it might appear.
