The more experience I gain on the Internet, the more I realize that there is no _completely_ viable solution to this problem.
In every other sphere of existence, there are boundaries. Countries have borders, people can seperate themselves from their neighbors by walls or land, people choose religions and by doing so seperate themselves from other believes, or people choose mates...the list goes on. Set inclusion, intersection, union is part of our social topology in the real world.
The Internet on the other hand has no boundaries at all! You can have someone from Russia posting, or a Nazi, a homosexual, a protestant, a porn star, a philosopher, etc etc, all in the same thread.
On the other hand, in real existence you may or may or may not allow these people into your real life, but it is very easy to block them from your life. The key is that you can block them from your life, and if they insist on pestering you, the threat of retaliation is real.
I have given this alot of thought, and the only thing that could conceivably work is for there to be a forum where every one of us would be allowed to create a thread where people would be allowed to post in it by invitation of the thread starter only.
The idea is similar to inviting people into your house. So for example, the forum might be called "Chit-Chat by Invitation Only." Now, DarkHorse starts a thread in there. He starts a thread called "Market Wizards" and invites eight people he feels could contribut to the thread. Those people would have read/write acces to the thread, while the rest of us would only have read access.
If someone thought they wanted to contribute to the thread that was not on DH list, they could submit their post and DH could, upon reviewing the post, allow the post to be submited and invite the poster to join that thread with write access.
The only rule that would have to be included IMO is that moderators can either delete the thread completely, or override the read only aspect of one of these threads after reviewing it's content. So the current power hierarchy of EliteTrader stays in place.
This would quench much of the appetite of people to be able to control who they choose to interact with on ET. The downside to EliteTrader is that many quality on posters at ET may end up only in these forum, and the rest of the site becomes a wasteland.
nitro