I want to offer an apology to Tom Richardson for the forged postings attributed to him earlier this week in the Kayak conclave and Brown Trout threads.
Message forgery is an old, and thankfully, rare act on the Internet. It destroys trust, is dishonest, and the bane of any good community.
The software that drives this bbs is one of the oldest on the web. It was designed to archive email lists such as SALT-L, and does not require users to log-in with a password and username to make a posting. Nor does the software permit me to moderate - ap
prove every new post before it is made public.
I believe "read and release" moderation is a bad thing but some newsgroups and mailing lists have become useless because of the abuses perpetrated by a handful of fools. When anonymity is an option, cowards will hide behind it.
There have been a number of occasions over the three years when a posting has been nasty or stupid enough that I had to go into the database and kill it. I don't like killing people's words. As a journalist I depend on the first amendment and its defense.
Yet I cannot tolerate attacks on other members of this board that are made under false circumstances. Lofty principles aside, it is a royal pain to dissect a massive text file looking for the offending posts and then rebuild the forum from scratch. That'
s why the blank posts and repeats, repeats, repeats don't get excised. It's too hard to go hunting after them.
What is frustrating is that unlike email, I can't trace the path of this one anonymous poster and ban him or her from writing whatever they feel like under whatever name they choose. Until this week that privilege of anonymity hasn't ever been abused.
There are no terms of service or rules of engagement on this board other than don't hit "post" twice and "sit up straight and eat your peas." For three years I haven't needed one and I won't start now.
Whoever you are out there who thought it was a good joke to sign someone else's name to your words: don't worry, I won't find out who you are unless you have the courage to admit what you did. You might be a regular who had a weird day. Fine. You may have
stumbled into here and thought it would be funny to troll for some flames and will never return again to read this.
Whatever.
So, my apologies to Tom Richardson (who is a Reel-Time contributing editor) and to those of you who were offended by the impostor's postings, and to all of us for my having to get preachy.
David Churbuck