I have seen solutions offered for preventing the posting of flame- inducing postings to this list, but found them mostly severely over the top. If this were not a mailing list but a village, I am sure we would have simple solutions for dealing with the village idiot. None of those would entail building a second village, or having a curfew or whatever. The simplest solution would be to temporarily moderate the troublemakers. That way you do not drive away the people that have just as much right to be here as the troublemakers, and you do not discipline the troublemakers in excess. Banning the troublemakers on the other hand would only be an option if they even cause the police too much work. As an aside, I wish people would excercise a little more constraint when stumbling across Bowerbird's ramblings. The Bird cannot help being an idiot. You can. I started filtering out the flunkeys, and currently have the following addresses in my blocklist: Shimmin, Jon Noring, JWaddell, Gutenberg9443, Joshua, CannonA, Brandon, and Doug Schroeder. These are all people who felt it necessary to engage with the Bird and make this list a worse place to be, when instead they could have shown constraint. The reason I am for policing still is because new list members of course don't know the trolls yet, and so may unwittingly engage in unnecessary flame wars. By moderating the trolls, you make it easier for the others to behave. Just my 2 cents, of course. -- branko collin collin@xs4all.nl