If your first reaction to the title of this thread is "who cares" then I commend to you the 36k + other topics on FT. However, I do believe this is an important issue to the FT community as a whole for it really addresses the primary issues of credibility and standards of conduct. Are we willing to accept a member who:
[list=a]
[*] Deliberately posts misinformation[*] Deliberately creates false personnas to bolster/buttress "their" own position[*] Deliberately creates false personnas to flame/attack others[*] Deliberately ignores this issue by resorting to personal ad hominem attacks
[/list=a]

I submit to you that this behavior is a serious breach of the standards and sensibilities of our community. And I feel strongly enough about FT -- and its people -- to take this unprecedented step in FT history.

For the past four days I have been hoping that ozzie would admit to "their" behavior, sincerely apologize, promise to mend his ways and move on. At that point I believed (later proven incorrect) ozzie's positive contributions outweighed the transgression of creating janejet.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum50/HTML/003806.html

A summary of the above link:

A post is made by janejet wherein "she" comments about something of which "she" should have no personal knowledge. It is plainly an ozzie post. Rudi emails ozzie about it and within minutes the post is totally edited to make it look like "her" again.

Several FT'ers ask ozzie about janejet only to be met with ad hominem attacks, obfuscation, and lies.

Meanwhile, "janejet" replies to an email. The header contains an IP address that traces to a Sydney, Australia provider. It is the same IP address as numerous headers in emails sent by ozzie. [I can hear it now -- Sydney is a city of xxxx population and blah blah blah. Please spare us]

All the while, ozzie wanders the boards, blythely posting away, ignoring several requests to answer this simple question:

ozzie: are you janejet? YES or NO?

For a couple of days I suffer through his ad hominem attacks about my "usefullness" [sic] on the boards, how HE contributes sooooooo much, how no one supports me, etc. As if this were some sort of school grounds popularity contest. As if by making positive contributions we should all ignore his other unseemly behaviors.

And I endured his rather pathetic lie of how many times I have retired from FT, how I go around announcing it all the time, etc., etc. Even when confronted with the facts, ozzie doesn't apologize for his unwarranted and baseless charges -- instead he refers to my old profile.

Folks, it is a disgusting pattern of behavior.

As recently as last nite we had this very pleasant and useful post from ozzie:

Well ozzie -- first of all your sic is misplaced. The plural of crisis is crises, at least it was before we had a president who doesn't know what is is.

And yes, that is my current occupation. I am attempting to keep a family together while the matriarch of that family, my wife Raeban, fights for her life against terminal cancer. It is neither easy, nor pretty, nor fun, nor am I being very successful at it. But it is honestly what I am doing.

And so we come to this fine example of trollery:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum50/HTML/003870.html

I would really like to know how many more personnas ozzie has created. Personally I suspect at least six more but that's the sad and scary part of a multiple-personna: how will we ever know? How can we ever read a post by ozzie and not wonder how many of his "supporters" are, in fact, ozzie himself?

This from a "man" (put in quotes only because some of the personnas have obvious female names) who has said:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum.../001121-2.html

[emphasis added]

I have always been an advocate of PDFTT -- Please Don't Feed The Trolls but I have never experienced a troll like ozzie. He has come into our community -- our home -- and, as someone once said to me, "pooped on the carpet". He has despoiled what was an otherwise pretty neat place focused on miles, points, the odd service rant, and best of all, comeraderie.

Does anyone remember what FT was like -- not way back in the dark ages when there were a few of us here -- just one year ago? FT really was the premiere ff site on the 'net. Sure there were disagreements, some ugly, some amusing, some simple misunderstandings. And we got through those moments of angst as a community and we learned from those experiences. And there was always an underlying spirit of honor and dignity and civility.

Now think back to the last five months on FT. Think of the flame wars, the posts about posts, and the overall usefulness of the board. Think of the signal-to-noise ratio -- better now or a year ago? Attributable to FT's popularity and a growth in numbers? Some. Attributable to one new member's profligate posting? Yes.

Now put the above paragraph into the context of adding another 1000-2000 posts to ozzie's profligacy. Wonder why so many "old-timers" are crusty -- or even worse, just plain gone.

If you'd like, go review some of janejet's and molsonmiler's posts and see if you got sucked in by some innocuous question they posed or some flame bait they cast. What kind of sick and twisted glee must ozzie receive from his deceptions and machinations...

Personally, right this moment I would much rather be trying to catch the gopher that is eating my granddaughter's flowers. When I returned to FT on the Thanxgiving weekend, little did I suspect this would happen. I came back realizing that, for whatever reasons, the community was willing to accept ozzie's obvious numerous distateful character traits (hypocrisy, inability to accept responsibility for his actions, profligacy, ad hominem personal attacks, failure to accept polite, constructive criticism, etc.). My goal was to ignore him for the troll he is except in the cases of obvious misinformation. Little did I know...

I apologize profusely to those of you who either do not care and to those of you who, for whatever reasons, simply chose to ignore either the facts or the behaviors. This thread isn't what FT is all about and prior to the appearance of the ozzie personnas, it was a rare event to see a thread like this.

My sole motivation for this is my love of FT. Over the course of 2+ years here I have developed deep and lasting feelings not only for the people herein but for truly remarkable place that we built together. FT is too good to abandon to the trolls among us...

My premise is we can and should identify trolls whenever possible.