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followed by periodic returns, promises of no more clones, then new IDs. By this time, we were used to his style: he had a chip on his shoulder about journalists' attitudes toward photographers and liked to boast about the tough qualities of paparazzi. So his next clone appearance was spotted within two messages; challenged, he went back to checking quietly now and then.

Then one evening in early 1997, nine months after his official farewell, he suddenly posted a batch of abusive messages. "Be warned I eat fucks like you and shit them on my real problems," he posted to a sysop who tried suggesting he stop. When I asked him to leave, he replied, "You would NEVER dare to tell me where I could go face to face. Or let's say we will put that to the test soon" and "I am a top pro with massive power darling, don't ever test it. I will eat you alive." I asked him if he was drunk. "No darling. I don't drink, I promise," he typed back. Then we kicked him offline, we hoped for good. There just isn't enough time.

I don't think anyone in the forum was in any doubt that this person had a problem; some who knew him in his professional life seemed to suggest this was not a surprise. He wanted to be liked, but was deeply suspicious and contemptuous of anyone who tried, the way some people are who have been hurt a lot. When I offered to direct him to some areas of the Net that were less structured and where he might find his personality fit in better (I was thinking of alt.flame, alt.tasteless, or alt.fan.howard-stern), he wasn't interested in that. I surmised that to some extent he enjoyed having rules to break and the attention that came with it.

There is no defense against someone like that until they do something provably illegal and someone is willing to make the complaint. They are incredibly disruptive, and on a service like CompuServe people are paying extra just so that professional sysops will give them a useful, pleasant environment.

It's become apparent to me since that the appearance of CompuServe (and I'm sure America Online and other online services with moderated areas) as a trouble-free zone is hard won by the sysops. Our local psycho, who became a sort of online tourist attraction when I consulted some experienced online professionals for advice, was not even close to being the worst offender, galling though I'm sure he'd find that news. I've heard reports of people running as many as twenty-five accounts at once, aided no doubt by free trial disks, and of people coming back time after time using ID after ID and name after name. The really extraordinary thing is how instantly recognizable these people become online once you're used to their psychological profile and posting habits; perhaps those repeating patterns are part of what ails them. Our forum members recognized clone number four within two messages; others report similar experiences. One day soon there may be a science of analyzing posting patterns the way there is a science of graphic analysis, or the way professional investigators track people down by following their known hobbies and professional interests. Such patterns are one way police could develop for piercing the Net's veil of anonymity in a criminal investigation, an effort that will be helped by the existence of services such as Reference.com and Deja News, which could be used to develop leads by searching archived material on known patterns of language or interests.

Then we got our second nut. This was a guy who persistently and provably lied about himself and his qualifications, billing himself loudly, in capital letters, as an "I N T E R N AT I O N A L P H O T O J O U R N A L I S T," with a list of famous magazines he was supposed to have worked for. In a forum full of national-level journalists who didn't feel the need to trumpet their qualifications, this behavior aroused immediate suspicion, so someone checked up on him and found the claims were bogus. What do you do in a controlled forum if someone is annoying but not abusive enough to ban, but is consistently lying about himself? While it seems obvious that you should warn your members about the risks you know of, it's dangerous to give them too strong a sense that you can protect them from every nut that may pass. Someone who does not draw your attention by posting in the open forum may go on for months, quietly reading members' messages and compiling mental profiles of their personalities before opening a correspondence with them that may or may not mention your forum. Small, older, text-based systems and many emailing lists have a useful feature here, in that users can generally retrieve a complete list of discussion group members, even those who don't post. You can't do this on Usenet, where there's simply no way to tell who may be reading what you write,