I'm a recent denizen on this group the past year and have been grateful for the information I've received from a number of folks on a few posts I've made in that time. However, I see there's a lot of flame wars started (in particular, the verbal attacks by one particular person) that really degrade the atmosphere of the group. I've seen similar net lunatics destroy other previously excellent newsgroups.
There is a refuge from this sort of thing. A former fantastic usenet group for my wargaming hobby was degraded by trolls and what was once hundreds of messages a day is now only 2 or 3 in a week. This is because we all went for the moderated yahoo groups or web bulletin boards.
You guys should set up a yahoo group - they can be moderated and nonsense can be cut out. By posting in a forum such as this, you just feed people like curtmchere (who will doubtless respond to this and start railing instead of thinking about why a relative stranger has pegged him the way I have).