Maybe so.. I have thought about this from time to time but most of the Elites or higher here have gone through episodes and web fueds that would probably lead us to abuse the banhammer. Hard to say really.

I suppose if one of them got out of hand it would be fairly easy to stop but you never know.

Taken care of.

And you hit the nail on the head as to why we won't be giving elites exile access.  If we ever do pull in more moderators for JU, the selection process will be very rigorous.  We have several access ranks between elite and avatar that are specifically meant for moderation purposes. 

I sort of assumed this to be the case. Community moderation can work especially when there are special priviledges to be lost if modding is abused. I would point to PWOT's (now absorbed by Cracked.com) community mods and the highly successful section labeled "We Saved hitler's Brain" which is where all the serious discussion is done.

Is it a real blogger selling lessons? Or is the "blog" simply a repeated ad for lessons? Generally the former is regarded as no problem while the later is definately a problem.

As long as someone is contributuing to JU as a whole ad not decimating Brad's bandwidth in the process I don't think Stardock much cares if the blogger monetizes it offline somehow.