I think this discussion is necessary to keep the spirit of the very nice LT community going as its population grows.
Personally, I am all for keeping communities open out of principal (treat others the way I want to be treated) and because I love sharing stuff I enjoy.
However, critiques to Hardin's (an economist) "tragedy of the commons" theory by Ostrum (a cooler economist) and others have shown that (among other) control over access to "commons" (shared space and resources) is vital to maintaining them in good health and to reduce exploitation. I guess a higher moderator to poster ratio will be necessary as natural barriers to access (LT is not yet in the main stream, etc.) erode.
But there might be other solutions besides more moderators or locking newcomers out. Is there something that could be learned from the stackoverflow model (
http://blog.codinghorror.com/introducin ... rflow-com/) and applied to forums?