I had some free time this morning, Roger, and I looked up your posting history. As you probably recall, your first post was in August 1998 and for a total of 12000 plus in the years since. Have you ever tried to suss out the percentage of complaining ones versus posts that showed us that you are glad to be alive?

No.

Is your post a complaint Ebbie? Our forum may not judge from the sound of this post (and many of your others) as if you are all that 'glad to be alive'. Especially if you consider that looking-up and posting only to make personal judgements of my posting history is really the best way of spending your free time. Do you consider that volunteering to anonymously impose your judgement on your fellow posters on our forum is showing us an example of being glad to be alive?

Perhaps you may accept that that no one is forcing you or any other poster to read my posts or respond to them? And that despite the example currently set by (some of) our 'moderators', that the posting only of personal judgements and complaints about a poster's worth is now acceptable on our forum – that however I may choose to post is really none of your business? And more importantly that my attempts to post my moderately expressed and honest views - is in no way preventing any other poster from contributing to any reasonable discussion?

That if I were not glad to be alive I could also ignore the thread's subject to respond with a post containing only a personal judgement of you? But as such a post would only litter-up our forum and totally fail to achieve anything except elicit a further response in kind - what would be the point of such a post? There are PMs for this - why not use them?

The following was posted when it was (wrongly) assumed that this site's owner, Max had prevented me from posting. Whatever the justification given for the selective restrictions imposed on my posts only, by the current Chief of the Mudcat Editing Team, this post shows that our forum's perception is different. That is only 'complaints' about one issue that are seen to be the problem to (some of) those who feel themselves qualified to impose their judgement on the rest of our forum.

Subject: RE: From Max: State of the Union Address
From: catspaw49 - PM
Date: 12 May 06 - 11:15 AM
>snip<
My bad of course for messing with Roger. He doesn't see he's been messing with us for years, but.........And to some degree, your bad too. He's used an old quote hundreds of times and I know you'd like to have it that way (no rules) but it doesn't work once a site grows past a certain point which Mudcat has. Responding to Roger earlier might have saved some of this. I dunno'......So how about reinstating Roger and I'll agree to quit messing with him? Just ask him to back-off the campaign against Joe. No more censorship complaints. If he understands that we are all playing under the same rules perhaps......maybe he might........well its worth a shot isn't it? Roger has written some beautiful poetry and songs and staying in that vein, he needs to be a part of this community.

All I am suggesting and trying to be able to discuss on our forum, is a return to where we were 'all playing under the same rules'. If we currently were 'all seen to be playing under the same rules' – there would be little need for anyone's suggestions to be labelled as complaints. And for this to be done – in order to provide some justification for imposed restrictions and thread closures, just to prevent posters from deciding for themselves whether they wished to read, respond or ignore contributions?

The penny eventually appears to dropping and even the usual suspects (after thousands of posts) have finally grasped the concept that (conventional) posting to a thread only to make personal judgements about the worth of a poster -- only refreshes the thread. Sadly – and once encouraged – the usual suspects do not appear to be quite able to prevent themselves and now start threads to enable this witch-hunt to continue in this thread. Not posting to a thread

Where their fun games continue at the expense of a single poster but ironically in a thread where – due to the selective restrictions imposed on my posts only – by the current Chief of the Mudcat Editing Team - a thread which this poster is currently unable to post to.

Such a situation could hardly be described as fair – and as fairness is something that the current Chief of the Mudcat Editing Team states that is his concern – perhaps all posters can once again be seen be treated equally and openly?