I think Robin that you would be hard put to find many organisations without such a rule; it is the ultimate sanction against an out and out troublemaker or crook. The measure of an organisation is how they deal with such situations in reality, and as I said in my original post, in the 20 years I have been involved with PFA/LAA at the sharp end, I have only ever known of one person being suspended for 2 or 3 months.
I think the reality of the more open forum that LAA once had (as PFA back then) was that it was wholly unrepresentative of the membership. There were perhaps 30 regular posters, not all members, expressing generally negative views. It is a sad fact that people that are generally happy with things do not take the time to post that fact, but if somebody had a gripe they could use the forum to tell the world about it. That actually gives a very disjointed view of where the truth actually lies - 30 people against the untold views of the other 8000 members. I'm not saying that the 8000 members were all happy as Larry, but they certainly weren't annoyed enough to post their angst, or were happy enough with the status quo. And let's be honest, in an 8000 member association you are going to piss some people off, either their expectations are unreasonably high, or you fail in your service provision.
LAA was in a no win situation because you do not change those 30 people's minds, if they want to believe that LAA is run by a bunch of egotists with their own agendas, or that the Engineering Dept is being unduly obstructive over their mod, etc., then there's nothing I or anybody else is likely to say that will alter that view. If the site is over moderated you get accused of censorship, if you decide not to waste your time responding you get accused of being arrogant and uncaring about the members' views.
The LAA does have a full time staff, but they have enough to do without responding to the forum, and the rest of us are unpaid volunteers, most of us with a living to earn and, quite frankly, with other more important areas of activity within the Association to take care of. In short, the time spent trying to respond reasonably to the more vociferous and unreasonable posters on the forum was out of all proportion to the benefit.
IMHO having an open forum brings responsibilities to those using it to be fair, truthful and reasonable. Personally, I would not post something I would not say to somebody face to face, but sadly there are those that simply want to court controversy, have a wind up or just make trouble for trouble's sake. It pretty well put me off from bothering with it at all, and even now I post quite infrequently because I can't be bothered with the hassle.
Call me a Luddite but I simply do not believe that the current member only LAA forum makes a ha'peth of difference to whether somebody decides to be, or stays a member of the LAA . We do ask non returning members why they decide not to renew membership, and the forum, or event the entire website has never figured as a reason. If you sit and think about it for a moment, it's a pretty sad world where if you want a forum that is lively and very active you have to let people with no allegiance to the forum provider post on it, and everybody to be anonymous so they can say almost anything with minimal risk of legal comeback. You haven't been able to do the latter in other forms of media for very many years.
