EXODUS

By 2001, impartial observers agreed that Lucianne Goldberg's message board was by far and away the most censorous on the World Wide Web. Posts were deleted willy nilly, whole threads were zapped and registered users were typically banned without explanation.

Chatterbox Lucy, whose rat-a-tat radio show is a big hit in the USA, was apparently not a fan of chatter on her own site. She had successfully seen off the racists who polluted Lucianne.com in the summer of 2000, lefties like Indypundit, Rednose, Kangaroo and JJ were but a distant memory, and now all that remained to be done was to put the old regulars in their place.

Webmaster Robert Graybear underlined the new hardline approach, instructing members that they would no longer be able to talk to one another! Instead, they should simply address the issues raised in the article which had been posted. Anyone referring to another poster by name faced banning.

Lucianne's biggest fan was a poster called Palo Verde, who signed off all her posts with the charming "Love Palo". She loved everyone, or so she said, most of all the Luce-meister. If one thing was for sure, Palo would be posting on Mrs Goldberg's site until they switched the lights off. Or that was at least what everyone assumed.

Unexpectedly, in June of that year Palo dared to venture onto the hugely more professional FreeRepublic site. There, she hooked up with a few old buddies from Lucianne and none of them have ventured back onto Lucy's message board ever since.

Rather than bother themselves with posting replies to news articles, Palo and her friends, who included other Lucianne exiles ValerieUSA, tomkat and Grannie9, merely posted on an unending cycle of chat threads - the very thing Lucianne had taken away from them.

To begin with site owner Jim Robinson, who was never exactly blessed with brains, gave Palo and the gang a free rein and told his staff to leave them to it, something the meddlesome Mr Graybear would never have been able to manage. Their giggly threads run into the two hundreds before everyone got bored and went to yet another site, Liberty Post.

Robinson though succumbed to the Lcom disease and his moderators began behaving in a worse manner than Lucy's ever had, banning all the old moon-landing conspiracy wackos who had made his site half-way interesting.