My thoughts:

1. Max has always struck me as having the best interest of mudcat and its members at heart - not to mention the fact that he is the one who has logged the thousands of hours to make it happen. I will support pretty much whatever he decides to do, and this instance is not an exception.

2. If one posts here with any thought of, "Gee, I hope so-and-so doesn't see this." then suffer the consequences if it gets out by any means. A few years ago our associate pastor was discussing MySpace with a bunch of teens.   She wanted to see some of them, so they all trekked up to her office. As she viewed several pages, she heard one kid whisper, "Don't let her see mine." She turned to the kid and said, "Bob, what could possibly be on your page that you would not want certain people to see?" The kid actually got the point - if teens can grasp it, I think we can, too.

3. For anyone under say 25 +/-, social networking is a fact of life. Many of the big controversies we "adults" spend hours arguing and agonizing over are simply of no concern to the next group coming up. To say we, as a group in an open forum on the net, do not want to participate in a world with social networking is naive at best and (fill in your own adjective) at the worst.

4. Have any of you "shared" a youtube video, even by passing along an email that was sent to you. Have you violated the person who put it there, or are you willing to live with the double standard?

If one acts responsibly here, there is not reason to fear that someone may bear witness by finding mudcat by accident or by facebook.

I, too, long for the good old days, but they ain't coming back. Perhaps we can do the most good by sharing as much as we possibly can of the positive aspects of mudcat as a community. There are many, many examples of wonderful human fellowship at Mudcat.   I don't post much, but have been accepted here since 1997, and I have always felt that I could say whatever I want. The fact that my words are someone isolated from the typical open and random access characteristic of other social networking sites, has in no way served as justification for me to behave in a way that might embarass me.

dw