Speaking as someone who was on the internet before it was the internet, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to maintain a professional forum such as this and not let it become swallowed by scam that is Facebook. The reason for this is simple: the forum provides a searchable archive of expertise and Facebook does not.
Please do not let this site go the way of a much lamented drillers site that I used (along with gCaptain) as a powerful resource when researching the Macondo blowout. Then somebody put up a Facebook group that covered the the same topics. Questions are asked, questions answered, exchanges vanish. No topic organization, no search, no posterity. Killed the other forum dead. Please don’t let that happen here.
As far as the two characters are involved, as someone who has been a moderator I think you have to have limited patience with those who persist in off-topic axe grinding and personal attacks. Otherwise the signal to noise ratio drops to the point where the people you want to attend drop out. I remember one guy we had to throw off a specialist forum for the usual lapses. He was a true expert in the field but (as I noted from checking logs) just about every time he posted after the cocktail hour he’d go off on some tear or another and finally it became too much.
Cheers,
Earl