Pudlo is extremely good at detecting sensitive subjects to which people might react emotionally. On Usenet he crafted subtle yet maximally inflammatory posts, carefully avoiding making them obvious trolls, and posted them using a fake name. It was also common for two or three people to mysteriously appear from nowhere and agree with Pudlo. At some point he took a step up from fictional sockpuppets and started posing as other well-known people from the community. (Remember that on Usenet there’s no verification of any kind. You can post using any name and email address you like.) That was also the point where it wasn’t just annoying (or amusing, depending how you took it), harmless trolling anymore. I’m not a huge fan of displaying the post count next to every post, but it does prevent anything like that from happening on the forums.
Personally I can live with Pudlo being active on the forums. If you put him on the foe list you don’t see his posts. If he makes a post, I click it open and go back again just so that it’s removed from the unread posts list. It becomes annoying only when people take the bait. The thread becomes active and keeps coming up in the unread posts list. Sometimes a genuinely interesting and constructive discussion comes out, and that’s great, but mostly it’s just a bunch of people battling against windmills. It’s useless to try to argue with Pudlo, because his posts don’t reflect his opinions – the posts are completely artificial, their only purpose is to annoy people. There’s no reason to tell him that his review is unfair or that he is nitpicking about inconsequential things. He already knows it because he does it on purpose.