What I found disturbing about the mousehealing thing was that it followed in the wake of the thread about the kid that got killed.

And what happened in that thread had made me feel sick at heart, and very angry with the people who were responsible for polluting it. But some people are like that. I don't go along with the kind of talk about lack of intelligence or people being braindead dweebs and that - it's nothing to do with intelligence. It's not even just attention-seeking behaviour. It's some kind of disturbance that you can't begin to make sense of, without a lot more information. It can't be much fun being inside that kind of person.

But then came the mousehealing parody - and what was sick about that was it's context, what it came after. That mmeant that it couldn't be funny, and the borrowing of kat's name made it doubly unpleasant. But I don't think it was in itself meant cruelly, just thoughtless and stupid, and the person responsible owned up and apologised, which was in its way brave.

What followed was nastier, because as PeterT said, it undermined the whole sense that this is a place where we can talk - whether about music or anything. Readingn through the threads affected you got the feeling of collapsng walls - maybe there wasn't a Mudcat at all, it was just some mad person with multiple personalities talking to himself. I had the same feeling that Big Mick had - I felt close to logging-out and getting out.

I hope that the extra gizmos Max has had to put in will help us pull out of this without damage. But it's so unfair - he's got enough on his plate trying to hold of the Hairy Fox Menace, without having to deal with this kind of crap from people who should be his friends. And it pushes us in the direction of constraint and restriction and show your IDs and Members Only and Private Property.

Ansd even writing this, I still get the nasty feeling that at any time we'll have an outbreak of gangrene here too.

I feel that Lewis Carroll is probably our best recourse at a time like this:

They hunted till darkness came on, but they found Not a button, or feather, or mark, By which they could tell that they stood on the ground Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say, In the midst of his laughter and glee, He had softly and suddenly vanished away -- - For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Ansd for the rest of The Hunting of the Snark try here.