Without being more specific about the nature of the problem, it's a bit difficult to tell if your solutions are good ones or if there's even a problem at all. I'm very concerned about the effects of the sort of policy I believe you would support given what I believe you perceive the problem to be, and so my reply is rather detailed in the hope of getting my position across clearly while being as respectful as possible. I've spoiler-tagged segments for convenience. Only the last tagged section is vital to my point. I want to stress that nowhere here do I mean to be saying that anyone is intentionally deceptive or stupid. Epistemic irresponsibility in a narrow area is the worst failing I'm concerned with here.
If someone is in fact clearly misconstruing an OP's point no matter how it is worded and is making both off-topic remarks and needless jabs at the OP, that's just straightforwardly reportable, right? We call that trolling, and I'm sure I've seen mods step in and put a stop to that kind of thing. So I don't know that the problem as stated actually exists.
[spoiler=Thread types where conflict/side-tracking is not a problem]On the assumption that I have some familiarity with at least one of the cases you're thinking of, I think it's worth discussing the different sorts of threads we see on the forum. Leaving RPs and other just-for-fun threads aside, there are a few kinds of discussion threads. There are threads that are obviously about opinions, in which it's usually pretty obvious when someone is going too far and which ought to be fairly easy to moderate. There are also threads about facts, and these can be trickier.
Sometimes we do “what do you think?” threads, where it's clear from the beginning that people are just going to be giving their own perspectives and are going to be avoiding direct conflict with others' posts, and which are usually pretty light on argument as opposed to simple claims about personal beliefs. I've seen a few religion threads like that, for example, and they actually tend to stay productive for quite a while.
There are also threads that encourage meaningful argument, and 9 times out of 10 I don't see why a new thread of this sort on the general board isn't going to be sufficient for when an opinion or “what do you think?” thread gets side-tracked. [/spoiler]
[spoiler=Thread types that cause conflict/side-tracking due to features of the first post]But there are also threads where there's a subtle trick built into the OP (this is not necessarily intentional). Although the main thrust of the original post looks like one of the above, in getting around to laying out a topic the OP does a poor job of bracketing out controversial statements that he/she doesn't want discussed. You see this best in certain religious threads. A made-up extreme example would be “Atheists – why do you hate your Creator?”. The natural reply for every atheist, however, isn't going to follow the prompt; they're going to instead point out that they don't share a premise with the OP, and they might understandably be a bit offended by the OP's post and respond accordingly. But this kind of thing can be more subtle. A “what do you think about Christianity (the one true religion)?” post is flawed in the same way, and I'd expect that thread to get locked in pretty short order. It's important when making threads like this to present the issue in the OP in the same way that you want later posters to treat it. “What do you think about Christianity?” is a fine topic, and the OP can even say in the first post that “I believe it's the one true religion”, but that difference in tone can be the distinction between a productive and an unproductive thread. Using subjective wording like that makes it clear that you're not trying to take advantage of your status as first poster to privilege your perspective on the issue.
Finally, there are threads where the OP's whole purpose is to function as an authority on the subject. The RAF School threads are good examples here, but they crop up on the general board from time to time as well. Sometimes these threads are on topics which, by common agreement, we don't typically allow anyone to claim authority – a “why [major religion] is wrong” thread which is treated as a lecture series by the OP is never appropriate for a forum like this. It's a subject that only works if other people are allowed to assert just as much authority as the OP. It also occasionally happens that someone makes a thread in which they claim authority but in which they make claims that other members, who think that their own beliefs are at least as authoritative, disagree. Generally speaking as far as forums like this are concerned, and for subjects which allow for expertise to exist, this pretty much guarantees that one of the people involved is mistaken in thinking themselves qualified to make a claim (or that someone simply made a mistake, which gets resolved pretty quickly). In this case I expect it to be fairly obvious to moderators and most readers which person knows what's going on and which doesn't, and that person can be warned.[/spoiler]
[spoiler=The conflict sometimes shouldn't be taken out of these threads before the first post is changed to address the causes of the conflict]So, sure, a “RAF School: World History” that asserts that God created everything 6000 years ago, that there was a huge global flood, etc, is going to draw fire. And it's entirely appropriate that it do so. There are people on this forum who are fairly well-versed in geology or biology or history and who are qualified to accurately convey the overwhelming consensus of experts in these fields (some posters may even be such experts). Absent a moderator locking the thread immediately, it seems to me that they have a duty to prevent casual readers from being misled by the OP. This is especially true for the RAF School threads, where the presumption is that the lectures are less opinion-based than you'd see in a discussion thread on the general forum. Moving disagreements to a sidebar is a terrible idea in these cases, because the whole point of disagreeing is to stop people from being misled - no one really expects to convince a creationist that he's wrong over the internet, and their arguments are so often recycled that you rarely even see anything new. To be clear, there's no problem with a “RAF School: Creationism” in the same spirit as a “RAF School: Greek Mythology”, but, again, the mode of presentation is everything. Surely the single most important fact about a pseudoscience is that it is not a science – the most important fact about any piece of fiction is that it is fictional – and if a RAF School thread gets that wrong then it is worse than useless (naturally some people will know enough to not buy into the system while still finding the information interesting, but all in all I feel that such threads would do more harm than good on this forum considering that many members are fairly young).
Ideally, moderators would just shut down pseudoscience threads like a RAF School: Homeopathy, RS: Creation Science, or RS: Fortune-Telling which pretended that there was good reason to buy into the real-world claims of practitioners, but we can't expect the mods to be authorities in everything, and forum-goers have to pick up the slack from time to time. As you say, this forum has a lot of young members, and will have even more soon. It's vitally important that information presented as fact and tacitly endorsed by the forum as a whole by placement in what we call a RAF School be reliable, and it's on balance a good thing to make sure that that's the case on other boards as well.[/spoiler]
So I'm not really seeing the problem. Obviously I have guesses as to some of the specific examples you have in mind, and if you'd like to PM back and forth or whatever and discuss those I'd be more than happy to do so, but otherwise I just don't see anything like the sort of widespread trolling you describe in your post, and I think that the mods typically do a very good job of handling just that kind of thing when it does crop up. Nor do I think that the sorts of things you're probably thinking of are problems. Non-malicious side-tracking of legitimate threads can easily be handled with a topic split and another topic on the relevant board, and threads where the OP has (presumably unintentionally) sabotaged things with loaded language from the start or where the OP has pretended to authority that he/she doesn't possess ought to be locked or somehow adjusted anyway.
