I voted for alterbative three just to be a nasty fella.

I have more experience with this than many of you. I have been using discussion boards ince the early 1980s when I was a grad student at UMass. A buddy of mine monitored---loosely---a 'discussion' board called Graffiti. It was anything goes. You wouldn't believe this board...there would 150, 200, 250 letters posted every DAY, full of all kinds of invective and insults, as well as occasional discussion of issues.

This went on for weeks and weeks and weeks. I knew many of the people who wrote, since we were all clueless SciFi geeks with no life who spent Friday nights in the mainframe computer lab till 3 AM. We would often use 3 computer terminals at the same time...one for D and D, one for Graffiti, and one for doing some actual work. (Obviously this was before 'windows.')

Eventually the whole process blew itself out. I mean, how many times can you call someone a ***, a loser, a hypocrite, a ****, a moron, ad nauseum? Eventually things got pretty mellow. The folks who had thin skins stopped using the board, and the ones with thick skins weren't worth abusing any more, since it didn't do any good.

roughstuff