The Governor General is a term used at the BBC. I use the term Witchfinder General as it perfectly sums up the expectation and function currently undertaken on our forum by Joe, but is also an attempt to separate a fine chap from the role to enable the role to be examined. However he seems to have proudly adopted and claimed the title….?

It would be a term I would use in the rather unlikely case of it ever becoming vacant and of someone (other than Max) volunteering for the post. Having just seen The Return of the King – I would think of The Steward of Gondor as another example of the role – as a 'holding' position (come back Max, all is forgiven and I have fixed the sword).

The (rather hopeful and dangerous) expectation of the role from some posters - is that the W.G (Witchfinder General) will always correctly burn others as witches but will never turn their inquisitorial gaze upon them…………

The term 'troublemaker' is never defined but I think it would be fair to say that in practice it covers anyone who posts to our forum - anything that The W.G personally considers not suitable to appear on our forum (except anything from YOU of course).

The term 'troublemakers' is one that is often used when justification for censorship action is taken to protect us from them. Even when the 'trouble' is simply one of understanding what the poster is trying to say - or indeed simply the number of their postings. As the W.G has also decided that there is an undefined but hard and fast limit to the number of postings that they will allow us to post on our forum, which the W.G will censor if exceeded (not a lot of people know that).

There probably is another analogy in the sport of football (or soccer). There are experienced players who become 'player-managers', often by default. They pick the team and also are also responsible for picking themselves and of dropping players from the team to enable this. They also buy and sell players, are responsible for their wages, for sorting out their player's personal problems and deciding on their squabbles. Many full-time managers and full-time players consider the 'player manager' role, to be the worst of both worlds and a very difficult – if not impossible trick to pull off. In fact there has been very few who have done this 'juggling-act' successfully for anything but a relatively short 'honeymoon' period and it is usually a temporary 'holding' position.

Perhaps the problem is really with the range of the W.G role and it can finally be accepted that it is an impossible task? We hardly expect someone appointed to be the school caretaker to be responsible for the delicate task of excluding errant pupils do we?

For there is no simple 'black and white' here - even in the case of a seemingly so-called racist attack. Is calling someone a 'Pommie Bastard' to be judged by our W.G – as a racist attack on our forum to be deleted from it by our W.G? It might well be but if we substitute the word 'Pommie' for any number of other words and it automatically would be.

Our forum can have GUIDELINES to encourage posters to post respectfully but where transgression will be tolerated. Or if it has hard and fast rules where transgression is never tolerated - shouldn't these hard and fast rules be spelt out - so that the first time we know of these hard and fast rules is not when the W.G considers them to have been transgressed.