Edwin - 1:07 am on Dec 6, 2005 (gmt 0)

One approach that helps works along the lines of the "broken windows" theory expounded in Tipping Point and elsewhere - if the environment is controlled, it controls behaviour to an extent in borderline cases.

On the forum I run, there are no avatars or signatures, and no advertising is allowed. Discussions are limited to a range of topics in the forum's niche, except in an "offtopic" forum that has additional rules. Because there are hundreds of thousands of archived "clean posts", no matter where the would-be troublemaker/spammer looks at the forum, they will only find more-or-less productive, on-topic discussions.

Combine the above with a core group of volunteer moderators, and it means that the few troublemakers who decide to chance it get picked up and booted out within minutes of their first post.

I don't know how scaleable this approach would be if you're running a super-massive forum, but it's coped quite nicely with volumes of around 500-700 new daily posts.

[edited by: Edwin at 1:08 am (utc) on Dec. 6, 2005]