And now on to Jim Carroll, an interesting person, indeed. Jim joined the Forum about 2008, and he and I had friendly exchanges about folk music matters for almost ten years. He sent me a lot of valuable recordings and such that he had collected by Dropbox. But Dropbox didn't work very well on my rural Internet connection, so I ordered a portable hard drive for him to use for sending information to me.

Then in 2017, I started receiving messages from Jim that complained about bobad and teribus and objectionable messages. Eventually, bobad and teribus and akenaton were banned from Mudcat, but I never learned why or by whom. Also in 2017, Jim began complaining about being "appalled" by the closure of one thread or another. I don't know if I'm the one responsible for those thread closures or not. I don't like censorship, and I don't believe in deleting messages or threads unless there is an absolutely clear reason for doing so. Otherwise, I close threads and post a brief explanation for the closure - usually that the combat got out of hand, and it's time to make a new start. Even though the thread still exists to be read by everyone, Jim doesn't like thread closure. On June 8, 2018, Jim sent me a message saying he was resigning from Mudcat, said he was considering erasing the hard drive I sent him, and returning it to me blank. I told him that if that's what he decided, he could just keep the hard drive.

In hindsight, perhaps I should have responded to his resignation by deleting his membership and blocking him from access to Mudcat, but I didn't. We really don't like to do that. By June 14, 2018, he was back to posting; and he was telling me about things he had added to my hard drive. And things were relatively calm until June, 2019. Since then, I have received about one long message a day complaining about things.
On 10 August 2019, I received my first of many complaints from him about Iains and his conservative politics, with demands that Iains be banned from Mudcat. And then after Iains backed off, I began to receive complaints about Pseudonymous. And it's obvious that both Iains and Pseudonymous were trolling Jim. No doubt about it, and we were taking action against both of them as we saw it was needed - but not to the point of totally banning either one. Both Iains and Pseudonymous have knowledge of and involvement in folk music, and many of their posts are of some value. So, are we to ban these people from Mudcat, simply because they are doing battle with Jim Carroll? Or do we try to deal with the animosity without a total ban of one or the other?

I decided to take a third path, as I often do. I told Jim Carroll that he had to stop doing battle with Iains and Pseudonymous. He was free to express disagreement with what they said, but he was not allowed to do battle with them.

More later.

-Joe-