Aha, you've been where many of us have before. Some of the regulars here started at the Bad Astronomy Bulletin Board (Phil Plait's forum, which was very good) which became BAUT (Bad Astronomy and Universe Today) and bigger, and then CosmoQuest and bigger still.
Some of us got a bit tired of the heavy-handed moderating there. Owner of this board, LunarOrbit, has it just about dead right, in my opinion, but it's obviously much easier on a smaller board. At least HBs are given plenty of opportunity here to have their say. Brief bouts of hot heads are tolerated as long as they settle down again*, and banning usually only occurs after severe rule-breaking and a few warnings.
Of course, some HBs prefer to be banned because it's a badge of honour to them, and it can allow them to claim they were censored and that we couldn't stand their "damning truths." Or whatever.
One thing that's occurred to me is, don't argue with a hoax-believer, address the gallery instead -- the fence-sitters and lurkers -- because they are the ones who can most do with good, reliable information. Keep a cool head and point out to them where you believe the HB was wrong, state why, and totally ignore any insults from the HB or, for that matter, from anyone.
In some cases the HB might get annoyed about you not conversing directly with him (for once, it's safe to say that because there are very few or no
hers in the field), because some of them are quite egotistical, and might well be narcissists.
It was fascinating here a while back when one HB claimed the lurkers would be on his side, so they were asked to de-lurk and say whether they were or not. A few did, and the HB soundly lost. By God, that was fun!
* For some odd reason, most of the hot heads seem to come from an area that's somewhere between Canada and Mexico.
Edited to add:
Last night I followed a link in another thread here to an HB on YouTube and found it really hard (read "painful") to listen to the guy, whose video was almost pointless. With a little more thought it could have been audio only. Well, at least the part I saw.
Then I made the mistake of clicking on the video of another guy I'd never heard of. He was talking about inconsistencies in the tyres on the rover in various videos, and I think in one case he might have been confusing the mesh lunar tyres with pneumatic ones in simulations on earth, but he certainly couldn't figure that a dark background could make the mesh tyre look solid. (Drat! Where's the raised eyebrows or the facepalm emoticon?)
His video was also so tedious and painful that I thought few viewers would bother closely following the guy. Poor presentation certainly doesn't help and nor does pointing out non-existing "anomalies" in photos or videos to people who know better. Short, sweet and to-the-point is much better.
