When dealing with apples, invariably there are one or two bad ones in the bunch. When this happens, bad apples are dealt with. This philosophy applies to the mediabistro.com forums. For every great forum post by one of our many astute members of the MB community, there's always a post from someone who's campaigning for the dumbass of the year award. These posts are often from spammers trying to unload their cheap, outdated, stolen cell phones or plasma televisions; they probably don't even know what mediabistro.com is, and that's fine because they're just stupid spammers. So until spamming becomes a capital offense (or at least one punishable by this), it's the nature of the internet and we all have to deal. MB deals by deleting spam posts as soon as we see them.

The worst offenders though are the ones who know full well who we are, but feel that they need post things that would make Howard Stern cry for his mommy. As you know, we have Terms of Service that ya'll need to be abide by when posting in the forums. I won't recite them for you, but I can sum them up in three simple words: use your brains. If you need help behaving, just remove yourself from the online environment for a moment, and pretend you're discussing media issues at a dinner party attended by you, his holiness The Pope, your dear, sweet mother, who endured eighteen hours of excruciating labor to deliver you in to the world, and a ten year-old girl who just asked you where babies come from. With those parameters in place, you should be able to contribute some meaningful content in the forums without resorting to anything that violates our rules and the rules of good taste (which are synonymous).

If these folks are still unable to play nice, we may have to revoke their MB privileges, and consider further discipline. And if any of you law-abiding folks see any posts that you think should be removed, send me an email and we'll take a look.