> That seems to be a real denial of service to us all. There's a very short list of chronic misbehavers who waste a grossly disproportionate amount of our time. We all know who they are, and even if you throw in a few sock puppets, you can count them on your fingers and have plenty of fingers left over. Every month or so one or the other of them does yet another asinine thing and we waste days arguing about what sanctions their latest offense merits, because they delight in attracting attention to themselves by skating along the edge of what's just barely tolerable. The IETF really is one of the most open organizations on the planet. I'm on a lot of mailing lists, and the IETF's are notable for the broad participation and the toleration of rather brusque literary styles. It is not difficult to participate successfully, and to fall afoul of these norms you have to be a truly major jerk. I've also been watching the usual suspects here and elsewhere (several also infest ICANN lists, for example) and I cannot ever remember one of them making a technical contribution whose merit even began to approach the cost of dealing with their noise. We do ourselves no favors by letting ourselves be distracted by people who have proven to have a negative S/N ratio. Indeed, I see some evidence that the noise drives away people whose time is not unlimited. I'm certainly not proposing that we ban people who are merely sometimes irritating*, but when specific people have a long history of sending mail whose value has proven to be comparable to mail from, say, Maryam Abacha, we would do ourselves a favor by treating it the same way. R's, John * - me, for example _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf