I'll try to make this a more structured proposal.
In the last years, traffic on this least has increased, which is a good
sign. However, discussions who used to be focused on Octave with very
rare off-topic threads are now often becoming tit-for-tats, annoying to
most of us and time-consuming for the developers.
I propose to introduce post-moderation.
For example, this can be implemented by having three post-moderators.
If two of three agree and the third one does not veto, a poster who goes
off-track or who indulges in Octave or free software bashing will be
gently and privately invited to stop after few offending posts. If the
poster's behaviour does not change after the second warning, the
moderators will propose a one-month ban of the poster to the list
owners.
I volunteer to be one of the three moderators, or even a moderator for
some variation of the above proposal.