Apologies, but my (inexplicable) reluctance to say who it was has led some of you astray. This came from inside the Marc "tent", was not anonymous and after a little phone ping-pong we had a short conversation during which they offered "profuse apologies" several times. Don't know how to judge the sincerity, but with the cynicism of age I'm assuming realpolitik rather than some Pauline conversion. The rest was the list of grievances with not a great deal more detail than given here:

Marc hurt by comments about Kate & Michelle..

I can see their point of view.. really.. but Marc Almond Inc. isn't my job or a significant part of my leisure time. Doesn't work for everyone, but out here it's a lot easier to keep fans and their comments in perspective. Now I haven't scrutinised every post, but in a few years I spy: That recent poisonous post about K & M, a few low-level whinges about what what was or wasn't announced when, and a lot more defending K&M or thanking them for stuff. Moaning is inevitable. Faced with poison I would have found a solicitor who knows how to turn IP addresses & timestamps into a personal postal address for a professional letter.

The paranoid

I just don't know what to do with the paranoid, but you clearly don't need to be that clever to realise they are paranoid given the predatory posts from a couple of folk. Truth be told, I'm more bothered by how all this will be factored into that mindscape than anything else. I'm no saint and that concern won't be going anywhere useful, I just feel very uneasy and always have around this kind of thing - bury my head, hope it goes away and that everyone else has enough wit to be tolerant until it does.

Some bad comment about Marcs family post-accident

I vaguely recall something, but wasn't it was one of those occasions where a dozen people immediately jumped on the bitchy/tactless poster? I can't think of a single reason why scenarios with that kind of outcome should be Disappeared. Could be wrong about that though, the accident was obviously news beyond the usual neighborhoods and I was a teensy bit busy repelling an invasion of posts that would have upset everyone.. a lot.. had to go join a major soccer-club fan forum to finesse that into stopping.

Kids could read the bad words/memes

For the record back when I did read the board and remove posts with bad words/memes, the first examples were posted by school kids (web-filters eventually put a stop to that). We all know there's only one viable approach to what kids experience on the net, that's accepted by the "experts" from the child protection lobby and an implicit assumption in yet another UK gov initiative in this area (Byron Review). Meanwhile has any innocent complained about the Catch A Fallen Star lyrics over at the Theatre, or does that have an "Art" exemption?

Don't agree that adults skip past..

::shrug:: That's their deliberate choice then. Some people clearly do what I said, many others just go somewhere else e.g. to Ben's Board, to get on with real-life. The only groups I can think of with any credible reason to hang around here waiting for something to upset them are a) trolls, b) people inside that tent.

The board has run it's course

Mmm.. hmmm.. the consensus amongst people I know (from the fun and games in the 90s) is to just kill it. None of them would deny it's a relative crock now and enough of the people I sentimentally cared to see turn up here just one more time actually went and did it over the summer, for instance the two former “pillars of the board” Harlot and Paul.

Besides the usual suspects, I've received opinions from people I don't know who post here. All wanted the board to continue, majority were very thoughtful and considered e.g. would understand if.. were grateful for.., and a couple were perfectly charming.. thankyou for that. I'll give it until the weekend because checking in here isn't a daily routine for everyone and I've had more pressing things to think about than this, but I'm pretty sure I want to cut loose..

Alan
15 Oct 2007

Once upon a time, peace reigned throughout (most of) the Internet, but then someone let the riff-raff in. By-and-by it became far more representative of the real world, but distorted towards the bad & mad who inevitably post twice as often and much more controversially. Facing this, forum operators, in particular forum operators risking English law, had three choices:

1) Close your forum.

2) Implement access controls (registration, blurry numbers people can't type in etc.) and spend much of your life routinely exercising "editorial control" AKA moderating. Trouble with this is that you seriously increase your liability if you ever fail to remove something defamatory, and judging whether something might be held to be defamatory in court is one of those jobs best left to an libel expert.

3) Don't pay much attention to the forum. Don't exercise editorial control, only get involved when some third party makes you aware of some alleged defamatory content. This is a good choice for the operator because not only do they have time to get on with their life, but there is much less legal risk provided you remove the offending item(s) promptly when someone has made you aware of their presence. This is called "notice & takedown" and is what normally happens. For example: Someone[tm] sends you a serious letter carefully pointing out the specific defamatory item(s) and unless you're convinced they have no case whatsoever, you remove the item(s).. then the world carries on going round.

I opted for the last one, which would be fine except that it relies on Someone[tm] to have a clue, not just anger-management issues. In this particular case Someone[tm] has decided to blame me personally for pretty much every post they don't like on this board, as though I painstakingly conceived and wrote every word. They did this via a phone number which along with my home address, I deliberately did not anonymize so people had an easy route for the "notice" part... silly me. I was at work when this happened, and luckily my daughter was still at nursery when her mother K (who has nothing to do with this board) had to suffer what sounds like an extremely nasty, threatening barrage of abuse. Not a push-over by any means, but she was very upset and very seriously felt it was threatening enough to justify calling the cops.. and that view hadn't softened much half a day later.

So here we are: I haven't been nasty to anyone around here, K certainly hasn't, Someone[tm] definitely just has.

The dilemma: Reason works, but bullying makes me more resistant.. on the other hand they've essentially just taken it out on the wife.. and if the relatively articulate kid were here to pick up the phone as usual, they'd probably have taken it out on her too.

I've just looked at this months posts and found one which is decidedly unpleasant and might be defamatory rather than just insulting, but it's nothing any reasonable adult wouldn't skip past. There's also a few paranoid ones, but the majority are basically bland and innocuous. Given some of Marcs work, quite why anyone would expect fans.. people who are already further up the obsessive scale than most.. to be entirely bland and innocuous is completely beyond me. So what do I do? Obliterate the non-Disneyesque realities because they're spoiling the view? Do I care enough about this board to risk what happened today reoccurring?

Suspect the answer to the last question will be no, hence all of the above rather than trying to sort this out quietly, but I'm still reflecting on it. If you've got a opinion, mail it to : abc123 @ indigo-blue (dot) com, and I'll try and get around to posting any sane ones.

Alan
08 Oct 2007

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