It might be a useful training and awareness tool for some people to go back to Mudcat discussions from maybe 10 years ago and see what discussions used to be like. There was respect and a sense of community almost all of the time. It was very rare for spiteful personal attacks to occur.

I am afraid you are looking at Mudcat history through rose tinted spectacles, Helen.

I am not going to name names or even the thread title, for fear of opening up old wounds, but I have just looked at a thread from January 2013 which was discussing religion and sexual abuse. It wad notable that a number of contributors on that thread are no longer able to post in the the BS section because of their subsequent unacceptable behaviour. One of these joined the argument a couple of days in with the comment:
    Sorry to interrupt yet another 'hatefest'.

The thread was closed after less than two weeks.

I found this thread without a great deal of searching and feel confident that I could easily find similar examples from around the same time if I wanted to.

DC