Posted by 166.102.***.*** on April 16, 2000, at 6:17:37
In reply to unblocking, posted by Dr. Bob on April 15, 2000, at 13:05:18
Thank you for unblocking me. I see some possible problems with some of the above ideas. A large percentage of people coming here have mental problems. So to expect them to be civil at all times seems unrealistic. Some people may be coming here to offer support out of good will and are not likely to pay so they can do volunteer work. Anybody can have a bad day and come off in a negative way. Sociopathy is also a mental illness isn't it? Some of these disruptive posters may just be kids causing trouble, but it is also possible that they are people having a psychotic episode, who knows? I don't like the idea of being stuck with one username. Supposing I have viewpoints that seem to other people to be very inconsistent. If I stated all these viewpoints as one alias or whatever, wouldn't that reflect badly on my credibility? It seems more reasonable to me to use more than one alias so that if I state apparently conflicting viewpoints hopefully the consistent ones will belong to one (or more) alias. Also, to some degree, computers are used to collect various data from internet users for what ever purpose often without their knowledge. This irks me and I would not be inclined to make this any easier for these unknown interests and consider it an invasion of privacy. Does anyone think that this data collection has the users interests at heart? I recently visited a website and it downloaded a fair sized program without asking me or telling me. I later saw the program and noticed it didn't look familiar. I then had considerable difficulty removing it from my computer. I think this has happened more that once. I may have downloaded a program and embedded in it was a "mole" program that would collect data about the user and then send it back to some party when I was connected to the internet. This is partly conjecture, but I am reasonably sure it is true. Given all this, I think a certain amount of paranoia is justified. I thought you might consider breaking the chat site into different compatible groups, but I don't know if this would work or be feasible.
poster:166.102.***.***
thread:30106
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000411/msgs/30198.html