People make mistakes.
Mistakes mean other people get hurt.
The people who make the mistakes sometimes realise they made them.

The way we run things here means that they can then keep quiet about it and nooone every knows it was them.

Or they can admit they made the mistakes and apologise, and hope that'll undo some of the hurt.

That's what Grey Wolf has done, and I think it's a right thing for her or him to have done.

However, the way things work out round here, one effect has been to stir up a bunch of anger and bitterness, and all the blame for the crap that other people who haven't put their hands up contributed to gets loaded onto the one who has. So maybe keeping schtum is a better thing to do, even if it's not the bravest thing to do. Which, if true, I would see as a pity.

But couldn't we lighten up? If someone had posted under my name, I'd get irritated, maybe angry - but I can't see myself bearing a grudge about it once they'd said they were sorry. Now we've got the GUEST thing it can't happen in the same way again. "Worse things happen at sea" as they say.

As for the pseudonyms, it strikes me there are very few people around here who don't prefer to use pseudonyms. I'm an oddball in that respect. If people want to have a number of different personae running in parallel, no harm in that, providing they don't act nasty. Jekyll and Hyde was/were ahead of his/their time...

There's the story about the little boy who's playing , and he's digging around at the edge of the stream at the bottom of the garden, and he starts the ground sliding away, and the khazi (as we'd call it round this way), falls into the stream.

And he keeps quiet about it - but his Dad says to him, "I'm going to ask you if you were to blame for the khazi falling in the stream - and before you answer, I'll tell you a story". And he tells him about George Washington and the Cherry Tree, and how George Washington's father was so proud to have such a brave and honest son.

And the son says "I understand Dad - and like George Washington, I cannot tell a lie. I was digging by the stream, and it was my fault that the khazi fell in."

And his Dad grabs him, and gives him a walloping. "But why did you do that? George Washington's father was pleased with his son for telling the truth when he cut down the Cherry Tree."

And Dad explained "Well, you see son, the thing is, George Washington's father wasn't sitting up in the branches of the Cherry Tree..."