From Wikipedia:
"In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community [...] with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional or disciplinary response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion."
Not that I think S.A.M. is the worst offender here, but there's no debate in my mind that she's a troll. She's characterized her own activities in almost the same terms as that definition, on numerous occasions.
It's up to the site administrators and mods what kind of site they want to have. Right now, it's overrun by trolls, since there seems to be some kind of systemic resistance to calling them what they are and dealing with them as such. If you want a site where adults have rational, productive discussions, trolls need to be guarded against vigilantly, and dealt with swiftly and harshly. And yes, that is undemocratic, but there it is.
But there are already much better forums for serious discussions, and it's doubtful that Sciforums could ever equal them, even with perfect moderation: the years of audience self-selection have already occurred, and by now only trolls are interested in this forum in the first place. The serious-minded people have all long since gone elsewhere, vowing never to return.
So I say either get serious about this stuff, or dispense with the pretext that SciForums is something other than a troll's nest. The real problem here isn't the quality of debate per-se, but the chasm between the pretense of seriousness and the reality of childish trolls left to run amok. Half-assing it this way just energizes the trolls, since the mods quickly lose respect, while providing just enough of a patina of respectability to make this place an attractive trolling grounds.