I do not have an opinion one way or the other about registration. I just cannot see how it makes anyone more or less responsible. The only way to make some people "responsible" is to legitimize their existence and seriousness by charging them a fee. Of course that would mean everyone would have to pay. I am actually against that and so my actual idea is somewhat more to the point of being hard nosed.

1) From now on I am going to completely ignore any threads where the submitter has an appearance of being clueless. There is NO way that a forum like this can make an engineer or a programmer out of somebody that does not have at least some level of innate capability. After spending some 6 months on this forum I can tell almost right away when somebody is clueless or not and I am sure some others can tell as well.

2) One way to make this place more professional is simply for the moderators to carry a big machetti and at any time a thread or post in a thread is out of hand or inappropriate then just hack it off like a branch across the trail. No questions asked and no explanation required. That could done by committee like you suggest OR have more moderators. But I would not simply close such posts. I would take the hacked off branches and throw them into the fire, not to be seen again. It would require no argument. Just make sure that people know that unprofessionalism will not be tolerated and simply cut it off. (And once again that should include individual threads inside posts as well as the whole threads as well. This way if there is some legitimate info in the thread it does not get lost even though it may appear somewhat out of context.

Another opinion of mine is that if cluelessness is included within the definition of being unprofessional and messages of this type are hacked away time and again there will soon be disinterest on the part of the clueless person and they will walk away.

It is also my opinion that something that I believe that Mr Steiner said he is working on will help to "personalize" the message forum and cut down on some of this crazy stuff. If you are unfamilar with the forums at www.codeproject.com then you should check them out. Hierarchal and flow of conscience format forums like those have a way more personal feeling about them.

Michael Karas

PS. I for one would also like to see a way better format for dealing with embedded program code in the posts that the way it works now.
MJK