Written rules will, as pointed out, turn into games where people spend their time trying to use the rules to further themselves or their agendas.

My suggestion would be to implement a community vote. People can vote other people down, and in the end have them banned for a day, a week or whatever is fitting.

With enough negative votes a member loses the ability to create threads. With even more negative votes a member loses the ability to comment. A member that's just a day old gets kicked out with a minimal number of votes.

To be allowed to vote, you need to have an account that is old enough, has enough posts or some combination of these. You lose your right to vote if enough people vote you down.

With this in place, the community will be more self-sufficient and not all that dependant on moderators. Moderators can focus on their core activity: moderation.

Details as limit for votes, who gets to vote and the such are parameters for the site owner and moderators to decide on.

The basic assumption here is that there are many more wanted and appreciated contributors than there are trolls and "asshats". Another assumption is that it's possible to trust a community to actually regulate itself. If one, or both, of these are false, my suggested system decays into chaos.

Luckily, maemo.org seems like a place filled with intelligent and reasonable people that actually want to be constructive and this makes be believe that my assumptions are true.