So lets vote people AFK, make it a token based confirmation that you're not AFK... not just "Are you AFK? Y/N?" if they fail to put in the token within 90seconds they get booted...
Win win for all, only downside is you'll still have ppl that are sitting there doing nothing who'll put in the token, that %age is pretty low and it takes some ballz to even do that. It'll at least mitigate the problems.

At any rate, I find most parties respond to positive/negative first impressions.when no one speaks 9/10 there's gonna be some raging if something (even something retardedly small and doesn't affect anything) goes wrong.
If you simply engage in conversation people seem to be less likely to be assclowns.