My feeling on this is that one should learn how to deal with impotent, wannabe "terrorists." We want Max to change the open nature of Mudcat, and perhaps limit new questions and prevent potential members from "testing the waters" because we're unable to deal with posts from one or two misguided children? We want Max to make the bad people go away? We keep replying to the jerks, and say there's something at the site that needs fixing? Not likely. If Max were to force people to become members in order to post, the brats would get free, disposable e-mail accounts and join. They'd get kicked out and join again with another account. Spammers and nuts in newsgroups do this all the time.

I posted this once a long time ago. It still is a fantasy of mine that one day, the threads people believe are worthless will be ignored because they are worthless, and will die. The "trolls," who's sole purpose is to focus attention on themselves and so disrupt normal activity, will become frustrated and hopefully go somewhere else. Even if they continued to post, they wouldn't take the place over like we allow them to do now. The only problem is the vast majority of us (and I realize that some in this thread are not in the majority) feel compelled to always get our friggin' 2 cents in! If the hundreds of people who post to newsgroups can ignore these yahoos, why can't we?

Forcing membership seems like an easy fix that won't work, and will create different problems. The root of the problem is not with the way Mudcat is set up, but the way we allow ourselves to be manipulated.