If he's a member of this community then setting a random spam bot loose here is tantamount to crapping on your own front lawn.

True. But I think there's a difference between a bot set to 3,000 posts a day and one set to 3. The former would be an earnest attempt to destroy the board (and no public board, by definition, is defensible against a concerted attack of that type), the latter an exercise for all concerned in learning about trust relationships and the tragedy of the commons. Sure, an admin should have explained matters to the hacker, and deactivated the bot's account (in that order). Deactivating the hacker's account seemed like overkill, that's all.

Mind you, I'd be upset if all 2,200 board members simultaneously wondered how hard it would be to write an empeg bot. It's just that the law of averages makes that pretty darn unlikely. If all 2,200 board members made as many helpful posts per day as Tony Fabris, then the board would be unreadable then, too. Part of being a non-disfunctional community is inclusiveness and diversity.

ALMOST every post that yz33d has made is a troll - list them and see!

A lot of them are trolls (and there some I thought were genuinely offensive). But the ones that aren't trolls are often brilliant, like this one, and (possibly my favourite BBS post ever) this one. I would hate to miss out on such posts in future.

Peter