okay, here is a proposal for everyone to comment on. I tried to keep it fairly short.

In reply to:

We the undersigned support the notion that the moderator(s) of this public forum should have the power to limit the amount of unsolicited spam and unwarranted flaming to which users are subjected. We support the codifying of this stance via a publicly posted message, appropriately highlighted. Here is an example of such an announcement:

A basic tenet of any public forum should be that the sincerely held opinion of each person is highly valued and therefore should not be silenced. However, moderators of public forums should retain the right to intercede in discussions that have devolved to personal and/or other forms of ad hominem attacks. Such attacks are an infringement on the rights of all to post their own sincerely held opinions in a friendly and open environment.

Moderator intercession may include the locking of threads, deletion of individual posts, or deletion of entire threads -- with the understanding that these actions would only be undertaken when normal communications and especially PMs have failed to resolve a conflict.