"FYI My responsibility is to stamp on spammers, not to moderate discussions, although having been an admin for various forums and mailing lists since the late 1980s I would feel that the petty bickering on TW would fall far below my personal tolerance level." - GordonC
I would "argue" with the term "petty bickering" because: 1. it doesn't feel very petty when you're on the constant receiving end, and: 2. bickering implies bothsiderism - that all concerned are at fault. It's pretty clear that one person has been the problem here ever since he joined, and most altercations with him are self-defense / pushing back against bad behavior. He was the reason FredM left TW for a while, and I feel badly to this day that I had anything to do with dragging Fred back here, as he was subjected to further rations of shit, literally hounded into his grave. Fred was one of the kindest and most knowledgeable Theremin designers around, it was just awful the way he was treated. I know of another member who was quite reticent to join in the fora here, mainly because they'd seen what Fred and others have gone through, and didn't want to deal with the head games. How many others have not joined / been driven off?
When indexing my D-Lev thread, I was struck by how I would post something, only to have it greeted like clockwork with random heckling and OT nonsense from this one person - it went on like that for a huge stretch of time. I did my best to ignore it.
"Other admins may feel differently."
Several years ago I got a wild hare and wrote a few posts mostly in fun, but that mocked another TW member. Thierry promptly deleted them and rebuked me - I understood why, and I regretted my actions and apologized.
Whereas this person has gotten away with posting the IP addresses of those who visited a certain TW page, leaving them up just long enough to presumably have the implied threat sink in, then deleting them. He uses these sorts of hit-and-run tactics quite frequently here. He has openly stated that he uses pictures in his posts as a way to gather IP address of TW users. Just today he posted to TW with a "missing" picture that traces back to his web page. He does this all the time and I find it quite sinister. I'm sure there are members here who wish to remain anonymous, and don't expect another member to be hoovering up their IP when they are simply viewing a post.
Combine this with his alternate persona(s) on TW which for whatever reason haven't been deleted / deactivated, and sadly I have to think twice before I reply to anyone new here PM-ing me - is it a sock puppet digging for dirt on me?
"With regard to spam postings, I have set up an automated procedure to email me changes to the Recent Posts pages twice a day. Most of the time, other admins have removed spam posts before I get to them. During intensive spamming periods I increase my monitoring and have removed up to twenty posts an hour on occasion."
I sincerely appreciate all of the effort that must go into keeping the lights on here. It's not clear to me why new accounts couldn't have a bit more in the way of authentication?
Anyway, not trying to tell anyone what to do, but I've had my fill.