Peg, behaviour, sure we all have our different standards and some like me can't always behave as we believe we should. I'm baised of course but even though perhaps they shouldn't happen, the odd angry post is going to slip out and I don't see any long term harm in that.

Where I see things going wrong here is rather that people letting one another battle it out or perhaps a rational general call for calm, round here we tend to get the "how dare you say that to him", "well he said that...", they often involve side taking etc. and we create our own flame wars.

The other problem which IMO is the biggest round here is the troll who's sole aim is to start some form of flame war and that is where many of us bite too easily. I can't help feeling many of us could do better at recognising that type of post and ignoring it.

Of course, our judgements vary and what one person sees as a troll, another may see as a good topic and rational discussion may happen. It really is something we all have to play by ear but I think the golden rule when considering whether someone is trolling or not is "if in doubt, stay out" - protesting will do no good.

Coming back to your other point, registration is common in internet forums, that is true but the fact remains that many places do operate successfully without any registration procedures. There are other factors in this though that may not have been considered. Here are a few:

Some groups or organisations already have an existing Membership and want to keep within their established ways. An example of that is the Annexe I started. It is a facility I made for the use of members of the Mudcat forum - I couldn't hope to keep it that way if there wasn't a registration.

People starting forums may be unused to the Internet community and be too scared to try open formats as they have heard about all the nasty people (not saying they don't exist) and are too scared to try more open formats.

Some people who start forums are little more than control freaks who don't want to see opinions that differ from theirs or views expressed in ways that they don't approve of. It might lead to a nice friendly forum but it also leads to nothing but a bunch of sycophants posting. On that one, all I can say is thank God (or whatever) we have Max here.

Not everone has the ability or desire to design thier own forum and there are other aspects such as cost and what can be run where to consider. In these cases, I would presume the organisers are generally making the best of what they can find/afford. e.g The best (IMO) free ASP based forum I could find for my purposes hapened to have a member only feature but being able to code, I would have re-worked it if it hadn't - not everyone can do that.

I believe the most difficult situation for a site admin to deal with is the Mudcat type of situation where a minimuim level of censorhip is applied, e.g. where individuals are threatend but the forum is kept open, largely asking people to police themselves. Unwillingness to take this on is likely to be a big reason for forums to go other ways in spite of loss of posters and content.

There are of course inconsistencies here (and I don't agree with every descision made here) but overall, I believe Joe, Jeff and Max do a great job in trying to play this minimal role.

Much of these rounds of troubles and long debates have, I believe to do with the responses and attitudes of regulars (not to say there may not be reason for annoyance in some instances). I would suggest that Mudcat can be special and a place that really does open its arms to others (whether they join or not) if we make that special effort and try to follow Joe's suggestion.

Jon