Well, congratulations, DU...

[TreasonousBastard]

130. That's pretty much it...

but I'll add that someone should study why any of us get upset about what's said on an anonymous board. There's something about having to have the last word.

I remember Usenet battles that ended up in physical violence and also remember the rising bile that I felt when attacked by a bunch of electrons designed to simply get a rise out of me and others. Once in a while I get pissed around here, but it's easy enough now to just walk away from a nasty thread.

But that's it-- it's only electrons making marks on a screen. I remember meeting some of you, and few of you that I met were that much like your onscreen personas. At the meetups everyone had a great time, no fights, no arguments (at least not nasty ones) and then we left and came back to the usual fights.

We had some meetups in several Usenet groups, too, and the same thing. The really bad actors never showed up and the arguments we had online were suspended while we ate great barbecue and drank good beer.

Compounding everything is whatever is going on in the personal lives of posters. We all read posts and sometimes wonder just what happened to this person to push him or her to this point. Sometimes they tell us, and we might wonder if they have anyone in the own lives to talk to, and sometimes they don't, so we're left to wonder just what caused this concern. And then we see a pile of posts with a strange progression and wonder if there's a drinking or drug problem.

Anonymity is a good thing because we're not confused by appearance or other things. We often don't even know the gender of the poster, much less race, weight, age or anything else that could influence us positively or negatively and we can concentrate on the words alone. But those words, those electrons on the screen, still fail us so often.