"There has to be a better way" now repeat that n+1 times and let´s change how people behave. Let´s educate and show people how to confront ranting in more productive way...let´s...or maybe not. People do not listen or do you really think that this place differs somehow from other forums now days? It´s not Nokia supporting this place it´s just nature of law what happens here. More people because of N900 and backslash of it.

I agree with you that there should be some kind of rules and thread where people can talk about them. Of course rules are going to be quite vague and how they are executed depends on moderator.

I think that after critical amount of user it´s pure utopia to think that there is way going back. Only way could be to reinvent whole talk.maemo.org and use something like what they have in stack overflow. But i think that would be just waste of current resources. It seems like moderators and site admins are currently doing best what they can and still there is so much to do around here that it´s just in it´s starting point.

I would say that you are dreamer and definitely not the only one and i wish that your dream comes true when there is communication platform that mimics IRL conversation as much as possible. Giving to it´s users e.g. to collectively kick user away or give some user troll notation after nick name or to vote messages hidden. Netiquette is just nice words that in the end of day mean nothing to some people.

ps.
What do you think wikipedia would look like if there would be totally free speech and total freedom to edit pages? And what do you think about spam or actually what is spam?