There's humorous and there's nasty and deliberately hurtful, and they aren't the same thing. Attempts at jokes by people whose sense of humour or humor is a million miles removed from what we might ourselves consider funny can be irritating, especially if it seems to knock off course a discussion we are interested in - but deliberate insults and abuse is what causes the real damage.

But what I've observed over the past few years is that these kind of things do run their course. At some point people stop rewarding the people who are swaggering around trying to disrupt things, and they move on elsewhere, or start to read their own posts perhaps, and come to their senses.

A good rule of thumb, I suggest, is that it is never right to say anything here that you would be unwilling to say face to face to the person you are addressing. There's no way to enforce this, and the relative freedom from being "moderated" of the Mudcat is a good thing in my view, even though there is a price to be paid for it. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't aim at moderation in how we deal with each other here.