I just followed a link from Sunir Shah's page to John Suler's "The Bad Boys of Cyberspace", an extremely detailed look at problem behavior in online communities and the ways of dealing with it that have been developed over time. It's based on Suler's early field research on the Palace avatar chat communities, so some of it is fairly specific, but there's a metric boatload of insights in there. The whole thing basically reads like a chat wizard's handbook. Here are a few section headings from the table of contents to give you a taste of what's inside: The colourful jargon used makes it rather enjoyable, especially when read literally. This from the section on intervening with Bible Thumpers: "The Bad Boys" is actually part of Suler's vast online book, "The Psychology of Cyberspace":http://www.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/psycyber.html. I recommend you have a look, but be warned that once you dive in you may not emerge for quite a while...