I vote no and I remain convinced that it would be the death of the Mudcat that we all love.

One of the beauties of Mudcat is its openess and that "passers by" are generally welcomed, they do make some excellent posts and sometimes even return and much of this would be lost as many people like to feel comfortable here before deciding to register.

Security wise, I feel that short of major changes to the Mudcat system, such a proposal is more likely to put extra burdens on the administrators than to stop undesirable postings. It may stop the casual flamer but as we have seen recently, at least one of the flamers was a Mudcat regular and I suspect others are. Such people will merely look for the next way of cheating the system and a battle of wits is likely to happen and I would guess that it could cost a gtread amount both in time and money to stop a determined person.

Assuming that a closed system was devised, guidlines of what is acceptable would need to be drawn up and these rules would have to be enforced by Max. We are still faced with the question. Do we want an open public forum and accept that is going to involve the occasional idiot making nasty posts or do we want a closed moderated one? I am higly in favour of the former an therefore suggest that the fundamental problem is learning how to deal with the idiots rather than attempting to set rules and regulations for posting.

This forum was built on trust, probably 99% of people here are decent trustworhy people and its openness allows even a causal visitor to settle and make good friends - lets keep it that way.

Jon