In Reply to: yep OH WELL who cares... posted by miss ford on Tuesday, 13. February 2007 at 09:47 Bali Time:
is posters being told by other posters that they are not welcome here. Nobody has the right to exclude others by making them feel unwelcome regardless of how you feel about them or what they've posted. Everybody makes mistakes, has a disagreement or posts something they wished they hadn't from time to time and often the offence wasn't intended but was a miscommunication due to the limitations of online communications.
Forums and bulletin boards are a notoriously difficult medium for successful communication. Although it is a form of written communication the style is usually very informal and casual more in common with how we might speak face to face but because we cant see or hear each other we cant rely on all those other cues that we would usually exploit to make more accurate sense of what the other person is saying. But it's not only these obvious differences that impact how well we are able to say exactly what we are thinking. There are the differences in writing skills and styles, differing levels of computer skills and even how comfortable people are with the comparatively new skill of reading from a computer screen. And if you factor in differences in age, life experience, politics, reasons for participating in online discussions, social skills, personalities, experience with online forums and differing levels of tolerance and generosity and it's almost as if an open general forum like BTF wouldn't be a chance of working. Mostly it does though, mainly because members are more likely to be generous with each other than not, and most regular long term posters, unless they have a burning interest in the subject matter, stay out of the train wreck threads.
If posters are posting within the forum rules then they should always feel welcome and included.