WYSIWYG,

I'm not sure what you are asking. Are you wondering how it is done technically? With filters is the short and sleazy answer. There would be an initial period of time when "the new rules" would have to be monitored and policed, which would take more work short term. Long term, posters using this forum would quickly learn that if they continued to violate the rules Max laid down, their posts to the forum would be blocked. That can be done technically by a sys admin, site owner/maintainer, etc. pretty easily. That is the technical way of keeping people behaving civilly, and posting on-topic. It is a method often used on mailing lists and in moderated newsgroups.

But really, the main way that on-topicness and civil behavior is maintained on-line is by keeping out the riff raff (ie not having a site accessible to posting on for anyone in cyberspace who chooses to crash the party--which is what moderated forums and mailing lists do), and for the group to be self-policing of one another.

As to what would happen to the off-topic chatters in a music-only forum at Mudcat, I'm sure many of them would leave and find another roost, as they always do. That too is "real life" on the Internet. Good groups and forums come and go and change on-line all the time, just like in real life.