As many have already noticed, the forum trolls, whiners and cranks have already begun to spawn on the STO forums. Soon actual communication may become an exercise in futility as useful information becomes drowned in a sea of flames. How to prevent this?

Solution:

There are on-line posting sites have the ability to "vote" a posting up or down. Examples include slashdot and wow.com. In one case a posting is rendered brighter or dimmer depending on the score. This has the dual benefit of leaving all postings visible for those who want to read it all, and highlighting the posts that are generall considered more informative or valuable by the masses. In the other case the system lets you hide all postings below a certain score, thereby allowing a reader to collapse a discussion to the more relevant information.

The net effect is that forum trolls don't get the attention they feed on to survive.

Can the system be gamed? Yeah, sure. Does it work anyway? Oh, my yes.

So, Cryptic: Please check out some alternative forum technology before it's too late!

My suggestions is, just like a bug forum and technical issues, they have a complaint forum.

This gives a specific area for complaints, and people who are enjoying the game and don't want to see the complaints...don't have to.

Here's the best solution that you could possibly get:

Wait one month. The forums are only available to those with active accounts. Once the whiners and criers are faced with the prospect of paying for a game they despise so much, they will cancel, and the flame threads/whine threads will reduce significantly. Then the only whiners will be STO loyalists, in which case their threads will fail.