It's a shame - but the people who go in for that stuff aren't going to be shamed out of it. You can just hope they'll get bored and move on, or grow out of it (which doesn't imply that it's particularly young people who go in for it, because in some of the worst cases the indications are that the people concerned are by no means young). Sadly enough, even if they do move on, or rethink the way they treat the Mudcat, there'll probably always be similar types replacing them.

But I don't think that trying to solve this by much stricter moderating would be worth it, because of the other ways it woudl impact on teh way the Mudcat community works. It's something those of us who hate it, the very large majority, are going to have to live with - and we need to avoid contributing to it by the way we respond and post. (Avoiding using words like "cretin", for example, I'd suggest. I'm sure it wasn't intended as "intentionally offensive", but offensive it certainly is for many people, including me.)