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Summary of Solution Ideas:

(In alphabetical order.)

A ban button for older active users that works if pressed by enough of them in a certain time period.

Pros:

• Increases the capacity of the site to deal with an influx of trolls.
• Frees up vote buttons to do what they're intended to do. For instance: People probably don't down vote nearly as much as would reflect their opinion since it triggers a troll tax and hides the comment.
• Prevents "feeding trolls" by giving the trolls negative attention.
• No need to rely on moderators to be good at being strong and tolerating stress because their tough decisions bring harsh criticism.

Cons:

• It is possible that desirable contrarians would be banned (though that could happen with moderators just the same).

Give older users more voting power.

A mathematical approach was suggested which would give older users more voting power.

Pros:

• All karma totals will be more likely to reflect what the older members want.

Cons:

• Votes reward and punish but they don't instruct well. This leaves users ignorant about what specifically to change, so it's power to acculturate them is limited by that, and the more clueless the new user is the more limited the power of votes.
• A deluge of the wrong type of user may result in lots of people ignoring karma because so many other people are acting in ways that don't get them good karma, or because they're the wrong type and don't care much about karma.
• It isn't known how much karma influences behavior in the first place. (I couldn't find anything about this in my searches.) I think this might work well on the right type (both motivated by karma and similar enough to older users to pick up on voting patterns) but is not as likely to work on the members that would cause eternal September.

Highlight the culture by making the names of biases, logical fallacies and terms from the sequences linked.

Pros:

• Makes it fast for older users to link to useful rationality materials, encouraging them to tell new users about them more often, speeding up acculturation.
• Making core cultural items stand out will cause new users to recognize them as relevant, when they might otherwise write them off as "some big word I don't know".
• Highlighting rationality related terms sends a visual message that we're prioritizing rationality. Visual messages can have more impact.

Cons:

• (unknown)

Limit the comments new users can make, increase limit based on karma, later remove the restriction.

Pros:

• Encourages new users to lurk more, acculturating before saying a lot.
• Cuts down on the amount of newbie comments older users have to wade through.

Cons:

• New users may lose momentum and may not stick around.

Limit the ratio of new users that can post in x time period.

Pros:

• Turning off registration has been rumored to work for other sites.
• Sure-fire way to keep growth at a manageable pace.
• Will not offend people who are offended by elitism.

Cons:

• Will definitely prevent some number of good new users from joining.

Prompt users to provide two or more words of verbal feedback when voting (not mandatory).

Pros:

• New users will know why they got down voted which will speed up the process of correcting it.

Cons:

• (unknown)

Require an agreement to accept and give constructive criticism (with a requirement for good manners).

Pros:

• People who can't deal with being held to the standard of being rational or can't deal with updating will be intimidated and less of them will join.

Cons:

• This will encourage more thick-skinned individuals to join than thin-skinned ones and may decrease the proportion of people who aren't over-confident debate junkies and trolls.

Require an educational rationality knowledge quiz to use discussions (but not to register).

Pros:

• Ensures that new users are familiar with important elements of rational discussion (even if only because of the questionnaire) that will reduce clueless behavior.

• Increases the hassle that trolls and spammers need to go through to make endless new accounts, deterring them.

• People who aren't serious about refining rationality won't go to the bother.

• Reduces the speed at which the population grows.

Cons:

• Some people may not fill out the form due to laziness, because it's an obstacle to their inspiration to comment, or because they don't have time right now and forget to.

Send people with poor rational thinking skills to the Center for Modern Rationality or similar.

Pros:

• Some beginners will choose to get training and that will be a good thing.
• Some beginners will wait to post until they're further along.

Cons:

• Tell a person to go somewhere else and they may just ignore you.

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Ideas that were culled:

(Both of these were culled due to the fact that they'd result in duplicate posts, none of which would contain all the info.)

Separate new users and old users into different discussion areas to contain the endless September or protect the older culture, letting beginners move up after they accomplish a certain level of rationality.

Pros:

• Including beginners somehow at the site is less likely to offend people who are offended by elitism.
• Newbies would have a place to learn as a group.
• If users were directed effectively (perhaps with the rational knowledge quiz) it would contain the eternal September while still allowing some growth and being a way to acculturate new users.

Cons:

• Labeling people as beginners might make it harder for them to learn or make them resent us (though shooing them away with down votes or allowing them to frustrate older users with ignorance will have the same effect.)
• New users wouldn't acculturate as fast and might not acculturate at all (though if the alternative is to lose the culture completely, this is justified.)
• This would result in duplicate posts since the different forums would often want to talk about the same things.
• None of the posts would contain all the information.
• Sending people to the Center for Modern Rationality is a better option.

Multi Generation Culture

Limit the number of new users that join the forum to a certain percentage per month, sending the rest to a new forum. If that forum grows too fast, create additional forums. This would be like having different generations. New people would be able to join an older generation if there is space.

Pros:

• Nobody would be labeled a "beginner".

Cons:

• This would result in duplicate posts since the different generations would often want to talk about the same things.
• None of the posts would contain all the information.