>> the chilling effect of vigilateism is far worse than spam or trolls. ... >I could not agree more. By condoning such measures people are damaging the >diversity they are supposedly trying to support. I could not disagree more. The spam and trolling create an unpleasant environment that drives people away. Anyone who's run mailing lists for a while has seen this pattern over and over, in which a tiny group (sometimes just one) of obnoxious subscribers ruins a list and most of the useful members leave. The ones who remain are thick skinned or socially oblivious, and are disproportionately middle aged North American white guys who acted like this when they were undergrads. We are all big boys and girls here. It should be entirely within our abilities to be reasonably polite and relevant in our correspondence. In this particular case, the execution was clumsy, but the action was entirely appropriate. We saw messages that were utterly irrelevant, from an address that had never sent anything else, in a style that strongly suggested it was a sock for a chronic troublemaker. Why should we put up with that kind of nonsense? I also have to laugh at "vigilanteism." There is no government process that vigilantes are circumventing; the sergeant at arms kicking people off the list IS the process. A useful kind of vigilanteism is private messages to people encouraging them not to engage with trolls, or to back off when they're getting too abrasive. I have received both, and I appreciate that people have taken the effort to give me a nudge. R's, John