Posted By:
Aaron M.Joann, that's another excellent point. If we've all agreed not to post e-mails, and the person sending the abusive e-mails can't be disciplined by the board's moderator, then how does the recipient of the abusive e-mails fight back?
He or she can't expose the writer of the e-mail to the board and can't go to the moderator for help. I don't know how else to say it, but that's just not cool.
This board has to be one of the least anonymous message board's on the Internet. My e-mail address, blog address and other personal information are readily on this site. Plus the moderator has all of my personal info, including my full name. Other posters have even more personal information available, and we have a rule in place that demands that if you post on controversial topics you give up your anonymity.
All of that requires an enormous amount of trust by and between users of this forum that they won't be attacked in their personal lives simply because they have consented to allow their personal information be available in good faith furtherance of our hobby. That means we trust that other users not to abuse the personal information that we have provided. If someone does abuse that trust we either have to have rules in place to protect us or we could end up seeing people read these horror stories and be less and less willing to share their information in the first place (which means this forum suffers).