great,

Newbie communities are great...

one problem with creating an online community is keeping out the rif raf. It seems that any place where people of any level of skill/talent in any area share ideas or knowledge, someone decides to become a trouble maker.

I suppose what you need to do in order to start a good community is to have a reasonable set of "laws"/"rules" which you enforce fairly and evenly. And you probably need someone who is level headed, and not really involved in the community to monitor your forums and logs, and who has the power to ban users who get abusive. Make sure that you are also logging IP addresses of posters, and that your moderator has access to these logs so that the moderator can take some action against disruptive users who change their login names. Of course, with it being so easy to get a different IP address, or even a different ISP, keeping a determined troublemaker away is extremely dificult, but it is possible to keep away most of the non fanatic troublemakers.

IchNiSan