That seems OK, since a member excluded from the view shouldn't be allowed to reappear and begin replicating writes to his old backup trees. I'm with you on not making this configurable. :) Seems like either it's something that works well and we just do it, or there's a problem with the idea and we shouldn't do it at all. The only (end-user) reason I could see for not doing it would be if the presence of an empty node /a/b had some meaning to the application; by removing the node itself we change meaning. But that seems pretty wacky. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4122007#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...