Friday, March 21, 2003

It's been a while.

Damned hard winter, but it's finally letting go.

The ice is breaking up in the creek, and so are some multiplicity forums. It seems it is very difficult to have a public webboard about healthy plurality, without recovery-movement victims moving in and taking over, freezing out those interested in a more open dialogue. It's happened before, and it will happen again. It happened recently on a public webboard that we were (and are) on, when people in two different systems were charged with "frightening" others with their outspoken, sometimes challenging (but not flaming) posts.

Jinkies described it like this: "Essentially, a system who refused to drop the principle that referring to oneself as disordered and broken for being multiple, and in fact implying that these are the same thing as being multiple, is not something that they can tolerate -- and in fact they had joined specifically to avoid that sentiment -- were told that was not acceptable to argue with people who clung to this idea."

In other words, people who espoused a belief that the victim mentality was detrimental were told that this attitude was frightening -- on a forum that was supposedly created to explore these very notions.

With forum members fleeing in all directions, the admin(s) responded to emailed complaints simply by closing the threads on which the offending posts appeared -- without having read them first, or attempting to establish any kind of dialogue via email, posts, or his chat facility.

This is a case of inexperienced management. The admin(s) are relatively new to running a forum like this. I'm betting there's a lot of things they regret having done now, but perhaps feel it's too late to change it.

In any event, the signs were there -- there was an earlier incident in which a more than usually smarmy singlet adult was made moderator of a young people's board on that forum simply because he hung out there so much. "When more complaints were made," Jinkies^Nate reported, "their best solution was to create a new forum to ghettoise the people who complained. Unsurprisingly in that situation the people who were ghettoised decide to leave instead."

Again unsurprisingly, that forum isn't much of a place right now. On the other hand, these events may have been educational to a number of lurkers; and we're sure the admin(s) will learn from these errors and continue to try to make the forum the kind of open-dialogue place they envisioned when they started it.

There are other places to speak with others and explore possibilities. What we've noticed about these smaller communities is how shy and frightened many people are of each other. They're worried that admitting they have animals or mythological creatures in their system, or even referring to themselves as "we", will somehow make them unwelcome. This is the legacy of the old time MPD Classic boards and USENET newsgroups: Fit the profile, or else.

We've been opening windows here and there, and letting in the fresh spring air.