I must disagree with your final sentence, Phantom. Words don't get up on a screen by themselves. A PERSON had to put them there. If we feel free to be nasty to people online because they're just "words on a screen" then we are no better than if we were equally nasty to a person we met on the street or in a pub. Hiding behind the quasi-anonymity of the web is no excuse for bad manners.

Why limit the topic of conversation to IN THIS THREAD? This thread isn't the only place we interact with people via the web. It's kind of like "But what have you done for me LATELY?" I see no reason why people can't talk about the harm that might come from dishonesty on the web, even OUTSIDE this thread. And the girl whose heart was broken by the fellow she was exchanging emails with was hurt by dishonesty. Yes she was hopelessly naive. But this doesn't change the fact that the fellow in question WAS dealing with a real person, not "words on the screen," and what he did was dishonest and immoral. Getting your jollies hurting naive or inexperienced people is still getting your jollies hurting people. Hurting people online is still hurting people. Again, there are no "words on the screen" in these sorts of forums that aren't put there by people. Real, honest-to-gosh, flesh-and-blood people. If you think that by using the web you're not interacting with real people, you're hopelessly naive yourself. If you don't like your kids interacting with strangers at all, don't let them use the PC at all.

Now I'm not saying that you are necessarily hurting people. But if you are using your GUEST status to be "brutally honest," and it hurts people, then it is. There may be very little accountability that comes with registering, but there is still more than comes with GUEST status.

I think this thread has just about devolved into the "did not"/"did so" stage. But we have covered a lot of interesting and profitable ground, in my estimation. Not that my estimation matters a rat's ass, but hey, if we didn't like seeing our own words on the screen, none of us would be here, would we?

Alex
O..O
=o=