Lots of comments now..

Tony. Having a private forum for pure class business like class rules and ballots have in my opinion become neccesary. We can not have the kind of periodic turmoil we see. It has been like this since the F16 forum started and moderation and a split is the only solution I see. By restricting moderation to locking a thread go haywire and having accepted and public guidelines for both posting and moderations should kill any doubts about "censoring". Closing a discussion for further posting is very different from "censoring". I dont think Mary is the right person to moderate the forum. Not that there is something wrong with Mary, but she is not involved in the class and dont follow this forum very closely. Having someone with stakes in the class do the moderation is needed in my opinion.
I agree that splitting comminications into a closed part and an open part is risky and in a theorethical world uneccesary. In real life however, it seems like the only solution.


Mary,
access to the "closed" forum would be by membership. We have earlier defined members as those who own F16s or are genuinely building. It has been like this for quite some time (as long as I can recall), but what John posted seems like an acceptable definition to me. "We" know who owns the boats, the class has not become that large yet. Rick and you would as such be class members if you still have the F16. Anyway, I think who gets access to the closed forum should be administrated by the class and regulated very clearly. What the closed forum is used for should also be clearly regulated as we obviously would be best served with as much traffic on the public forum as possible.
I disagree that the class dont have "real class organization". It is a small organization, but well defined, well working and all information about it is publicly available. If you visit formula16.org you will find the same or more information about the organization of the class as every other class out there. As national associations are created, information about this will be posted on the website.
What I really want is for someone in the class to have the power to lock/stop threads going haywire.