> i don't mind people lazily omitting fields, but what I *do* mind is them
> writing:
>
>  \author{ ...\footnotemark{\ddag}}
>  .....
>  \footnotetext{\ddag}{Corresponding author, current address The Moon}
>
> ie i can cope with missing information, but not with visual formatting
> masquerading as logical markup

Quite so.  Bane of everyone's life, is this visual formatting.

> so allow people to leave stuff out, but try and stop them inserting
> horrors into what they do write. BAN THE \thanks COMMAND!!!!!

Banning \thanks merely encourages them to write the rubbish out by
hand, as you so eloquently suggest above.  Short of making each and
every command blow up in subtle ways I don't see how you stop people
from doing daft things like this.

Robin