A correction to UJ's second post: While Paltalk does provide locked and private rooms, most of the music rooms (I don't go elsewhere) are open and retain a freindly atmosphere. In fact some previously locked rooms went open with no problems when Paltalk started to charge for the "private functions" without problems. Paltalk do of course provide a bounce facility to get rid of trouble makers and, overall, they soon learn.

Paltalk does however present a different problem to Mudcat as it involves live chat in real time. If the majority of room owners and admins manage to operate happily in an open environment and deal with the occasional real time interuption on a microphone, one would have thought it would be a rather more simple matter for people to skip over a post or a thread here.

Justa Picker said:

They seem to manage to do just that in other unmoderated music newsgroups I read. The level of trolling in this place is at high at a moment and I can't help but think a big part of the reason is that people are so easy to bait round here - this place must be a trolls paradise.

Many newsgroups have no one to turn to (except maybe complain to an ISP when there is repeated spam) and people seem to have learned the art of ignoring threads. Perhaps some people thinking "Max should do this", others thinking "Joe should do that", etc. is part of the problem - perhaps in the absence of a "father figure", people have succesfully learned to grow up more quickly.

There is of course the question of members posting as guests for reasons other than simple trolling here but I still see ignoring as the best policy. If it came to the push, the only sure way I can see of tightening up round here would involve a member only posting system which at least would allow the removal of a troublesome members but I feel we would lose out on a lot of good material if such a policy was adopted.

It would IMO be a tragedy to see that openness lost for what is probably mostly caused by and certainly not helped by inability of members to ignore posts they don't like.

Can't people at least try the ignoring policy which works elsewhere and is documented in many places on the internet as being the solution for a while before screaming for control measures?

Jon