YooMoot.com

Online forums can be too chaotic for coherent debate -- thanks to all those meandering idiots, it's impossible to reach a conclusion on America's faked moon landing, or "who did eat all the pies?". Bringing order to the chaos, YooMoot, just launched in public beta

From a North London based twosome who co-researched a uni project on 'net forums, Moot's a noble attempt to create a structured format for internet pow-wows, bringing coherence to "mass conversations" through posting rules designed to break down complex topics logically, producing what they hope to become a "Wikipedia for discussions" *[report abuse].

Each debate's started with a "moot" -- a question, statement, bookmark, or article -- with subsequent exchanges kept rigorously on-topic with "YooMoot's Razor": a platonic-style nested question-answer format that demands clear signposts when different branches of an issue are explored; signposts can be navigated with a "Discussion Browser", so you can quickly skip from "Do central banks maintain currency scarcity in order to create conflict?" to "Does industry welcome war?", or from "Who do you want to see replace Rafa Benitez as Liverpool FC's new manager?" to "José Mourinho: How cool am I?".

Further tidying things, the answers under each question are concisely summarized at the top of the page, and "Stray Posts" that don't adhere to the site's best practice code are routinely edited by "Trusted Users", i.e., people who "haven't done anything naughty", such as deleting their cookies before dinner

Future plans include "YooMoot Pro" (which will allow private organizations to create closed structured debates), and a plug-in to allow other sites to incorporate Moot's tech, so even if you're on some random blog it'll be impossible for the idiots to Arm-strong the debate.