Permit me to add my 2 cents worth. I do not profess to know much about the weather. I asked a serious question last night relating to Jeff H forecasting models because his forecast did not match with those of the BOM etc. I stated in my comment that it was not a personal attack as I was wanting to know how he arrived at his 'opinion'.
I also think healthy debate can be quite informative, when the comments and opinions added are based on factual information at hand and not someone's 'gut feeling' or 'psychic intervention'. Posts like these should be deleted as far too many people take it as gospel and it becomes similar to Chinese whispers.
There are several frequent posters on these boards that should not be allowed to have Internet access due to the amount of absolute garbage they post and frequent repetition of stupidity and waste of bandwidth....I think we all know who they may be.
Many people post things that are completely irrelevant purely for the sake of posting and a 'look at me' mentality.
If I was a newbie here, I could well have packed the family in to the car and raced off to the highest mountain to escape the impending doom....there is one particular poster that can find an impending weather disaster at the first sign of a sun shower or a breath of wind above 15 knots! We don't need to know your uneducated thoughts FFS !
By the same token, any educated forecasting needs to be done with the utmost respect to responsible reporting...unlike most media outlets.
To combat this will require some new rules and perhaps a change as to where people are allowed to post. I would suggest that two threads be run simultaneously on the same topic - one could only be accessed by those that the mods see fit to post (experienced forecasting or previous competent track record) thereby eliminating all of the unnecessary conjecture and sniping remarks.
The other would allow all the other pelicans, psychics, snake oil salesmen, bus drivers, 'experts', politicians, trolls etc to continue to post their 'thoughts' and expert opinions. Posters can contribute their local observations and questions in here but not in the limited access thread.
In addition, like other forums I frequent, I suggest there should also be a thread called 'Fight Club' where those that have the biggest monitor and keyboards are allowed to simply go at each other with the largest amount of male bovine manure until their tiny little hearts and tiny little other things are content ! Therefore, you would only need to read the insults if you were compelled to do so in it's very own forum.
Further moderation is required and I would suggest you are very particular about who should become a moderator. Perhaps call for nominations and conduct a poll?

Good points storm tempest and missychops. Ironic how a thread which I interpreted to be a bit of a "here if you wanna whinge, go whinge here" thread, is actually the one where it seems to be more civil and reasonable than the others lol

Personally I don't think there need to be rules, separate threads etc. People just need to grow up a bit - that simple. If they can't, then ban them for a few days.... 3 strikes and your out kind of thing.

I see even over night there were still "I don't want to get involved but I just had to say my piece and I think we should just focus on the weather and that's all I'm going to say"..... Now I'm not picking on those who posted it, but there was yesterday pages and pages of the same thing. Is everyone thinking it? Probably! Does it need to be said? No. Unless your posting in the lounge, your post should allude to the weather events, and ONLY to the weather events.

Seems you have exactly the same problems/issues we had in the tropical threads in the lead up to TC Yasi last year. Lots of suggestions were put forward in the post mortem including some of the ideas above as well as others such as limiting people posting in certain forums to one every 10 minutes.
I don't know what the answer is but it only happens during what has the potential to be a severe event in a populated area. WA has a potential impact from a Cat 4 cyclone but i doubt that thread will degenerate to anywhere near the same extent.