Once again we had a rollicking good thread full of cut and thrust, intelligent debate and a bit of fun too. Perfect. Well not quite perfect because a couple of posters got a strop on and it all got a bit personal.

The result: no more thread. The mindless dross sails happily on but anything really stimulating eventually gets binned because of the immature actions of one or two out of the dozens who post on it.

Solution: I remember from something JoeP said along time ago on exactly the same subject that it was possible to ban people from certain areas; I can't remember precisely how it works tbh. What if another of these areas is set up specifically to house threads that go off the rails a bit.

The thread gets moved to this alternative area and the couple of posters who have caused the problem are banned from it; the thread is therefore free to continue without them but they are still able to use the rest of the forum.

There is a modification for the forum software that enables users to be banned from specific threads. However we would prefer users respect polite warnings from the moderators to adjust their style of posting. If a user ignored such warnings and was subsquentally banned from that thread then there is, based on our experience, a very high likelhood they would simply start a fresh thread. Thanks for the suggestion but at present we are not looking to implement it... however a "vote to hide this post" modification may be in the pipeline ( late 2008 ).