WHERE'S WACKO?

Message boards like Lucianne.com and Free Republic had long provided a home for kooks and crazies. But as both Conservative forums banned all the nutballs to make their sites more appealing to the mainstream, the loonies were forced to find new lodgings in 2002.

The Conservatives who had joined the primitive Pipebomb gradually grew restless at owner Bill Mayer's apparent reluctance to implement any technical improvements whatsoever. And when in January 2003 Mayer got into a scrap with his main sponsor - a small businessman who posted as Badeye - it was the spark for many to defect to a forum called LibertyPost.

Liberty Post appears to house some of the kookiest kooks in America - people who were even banned from FreeRepublic (Tinfoil Central itself) for being nutso. Every day it's posters expound cuckoo theories about how the moon landings were faked and the World Trade Center attacks were carried out by the CIA.

It seems many "rubber neckers" just register there so they can laugh at the inmates, a strange breed cruelly - but correctly - dubbed LePers by their many critics. The forum is jointly run by a shadowy ex-convict called John Kotmair and an amiable hippy named Neil McIver, who likes to rant about the government's inadequacies to anyone interested enough to listen.

Dubbed "The Dude" by friends, his bizarre views on tax avoidance and driving without a licence perhaps qualify him to be King Kook. As with FreeRepublic, instead of funding the site themselves, Liberty Post's silent partner Kotmair - who runs an organization dedicated to tax-dodging - and The Dude pass round the begging bowl every couple of months and try to guilt-trip registered posters into making donations to the "Leper Colony's" upkeep.

Recently, an even crazier site sprang up, charmingly called "F.U." (Freedom Underground) after Liberty Post's resident loonies decided they'd had enough of being laughed at and baited by mainstream Freepers on the forum. Within days of its opening, F.U. had begun banning people for being too sane.