The Hall of Fame debate goes on. It may soon catch the Energizer bunny because it keeps going and going and going. To put it another way, round and round and round it goes, where or when it’ll stop nobody knows.

That’s one of the charms of baseball. In many different ways, it generates differences of opinion and fuels debate. As long as the debate remains on a civil level it can be fun and even educational. Unfortunately the Internet has spawned incivility. It has become an enabler of malicious comments. People feel free to say things on the Internet, either in Web site comments or in e-mail messages that they would never say to someone’s face.

But in polite Internet company we can always learn from listening to the opinions of others. For example, a proponent of the new statistics I have had little use for has invited me to engage in a dialogue about them. I may take him up on the offer.

We don’t have to accept alien opinions; we reserve the right to reject them.

With that thought in mind, I relate a recent discussion about the Hall of Fame that I had with a former colleague, who just might have convinced me that her idea makes more sense than anything I have heard on the subject.

We were talking about the difficulty the steroids era has created for Hall of Fame voters. Of the players who have been linked to steroids, two have appeared on the ballot, and Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro both have felt the backlash.

In five elections, one third of his eligibility, McGwire has yet to receive 25 percent of the vote (75 percent is needed for election) and this year gained his lowest support, 19 percent. In his first appearance on the ballot this year, Palmeiro received a meager 11 percent.

We can all have opinions about whether McGwire and Palmeiro were Hall of Famers based on their careers, ignoring the aid they might have received from performance-enhancing drugs.

Some voters have said they wouldn’t vote for McGwire because he was a one-dimensional player. But 583 home runs represent a pretty impressive dimension. Some voters have said they wouldn’t vote for Palmeiro because he wasn’t a dominant player. But he is one of only four players in history to have 500 home runs and 3,000 hits (the other three are Hall residents), and those homers and hits had to do some damage.

McGwire and Palmeiro have undermined their chances of getting to the Hall with their steroids implications, one via an admission, the other by a suspension. What about Jeff Bagwell?

Bagwell drove in 1,500 runs and scored 1,500, joining 19 Hall of Famers at those plateaus. He received 42 percent of the vote, something of a surprise because he was the subject of steroids speculation. But he had a very impressive career as the Astros’ offensive leader, and he was never caught using steroids.

There will be a lot of Bagwells from the steroids era to be considered. Writers will be in a perpetual quandary trying to sort it all out. Two years ago a member of the Baseball Writers Association proposed that the writers formulate guidelines for voting in the Hall of Fame election, but the idea went nowhere.

I was opposed to having the association set rules for me to vote by, just as I was opposed to the Hall’s board of directors changing or clarifying the rule regarding eligibility to make sure Pete Rose would not be elected to Hall membership after his banishment from baseball.

But the former colleague I mentioned, Claire Smith, suggested in our conversation that it was time for the Hall of Fame itself to determine its own future and that means letting the voting writers know how it wants to deal with players in the steroids era. It is, after all, not the writers’ Hall of Fame; it is the Hall of Fame’s Hall of Fame.

We vote on candidates, but we, in effect, work for the Hall, which is a private entity. It’s a business. The voters do not have a piece of the business. If in future years the Hall suffers from a lack of fan interest, the Hall, and not the writers, will suffer.

What I am suggesting is that at the rate the annual voting is going a lot of this era’s best players will not be elected to the Hall. McGwire and Palmeiro will not be alone in their failure to win election.

More such players are coming, some with indisputable credentials, steroids aside, namely Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa in only two years. (If I mention Mike Piazza, it will only ignite another firestorm of inflammatory e-mail from his fans.)

Will Hall officials erect a new wing at their museum displaying pictures and career records of Bonds, Clemens, Sosa et al with plaques saying, “Maybe he was good enough to be here without question, but he was either a contributor to or a victim of the steroids era.”

But Smith, with whom I worked at The New York Times and is now a news editor at ESPN, said, “Were there really victims because victims could have spoken out and demanded action. Everybody embraced the era. No one was outraged.”

The Hall of Fame, however, is not about to change anything.

“We hold in high regard what the writers have done over the years,” Jeff Idelson, Hall of Fame president, said in a telephone interview. “We feel the writers have done excellent work in evaluating the ballot and we’ll be comfortable with whomever the writers elect.”

Idelson said the Hall maintains an ongoing dialogue with the BBWAA “and we have made ourselves available for any discussion of the voting rules. Our board of directors is comfortable with the rules. I don’t see them changing. The guidelines give the writers latitude to make decisions. Right now we’re comfortable with the rules as they were written.”

I asked Idelson if he anticipated a potential problem for the Hall if the writers fail to elect big-name players because of steroids.

“I wouldn’t discuss that,” he said. “Players can be on the ballot for 15 years, and we’ve seen repeatedly over the course of voting that time changes people’s perspective.”

Players who are in the Hall of Fame often don’t want to see other players walk through the doors on Main Street in Cooperstown. That’s why the Hall of Famers didn’t elect any newcomers when they twice served as the veterans committee.

The Hall of Famers certainly don’t care for steroids users. I asked one of them, Frank Robinson, how he thought writers should deal with the problem of deciding whom to vote for.

“There’s no clear-cut answer,” Robinson said in a telephone interview. “I think you have to use your instincts more than anything else. I think most people have feelings on certain players.

What did he think of the idea of having the Hall establish special steroids guidelines for the voters?

“It’s not an answer to this,” he said.”

But in the near future the Hall, deprived of glamorous names and faces, may see the need to do something. Idelson said the Cooperstown museum is more than players’ plaques, and it is. And artifacts from players who aren’t in the Hall are there, hanging on the walls and enclosed in glass cases.

The Hall of Fame players, though, create the most attention, and if the Bondses and the Clemenses aren’t members, the Hall could suffer.

And unless fans travel to Cooperstown, they won’t see the baseballs, the gloves, the shoes and the uniforms. They don’t have to see the plaques to know who is in and who isn’t in the Hall of Fame. But as long as they know that, the debate will go on.