h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Not trying to open a new can of worms, but I think this is an important event that has rattled the community, and I'm curious how Zaphodistas feel about it. I've noticed several Zaps who have become friends with Arpeggio and defended her during the first one week suspension. I was a little worried that someone would want to mount a Zaphodista protest (seems kind of natural, since we already have arguments with the h2g2 staff about the new restrictions).

I think that first suspension was reasonable, and I have mixed feelings about this final banishment. On the one hand, the decoded message sounds in character for Arpeggio. On the other hand, it was all X'ed out! How can you banish someone for an insulting ranting message that was self-censored? Did she intentionally leave just enough letters showing so that people would be able to read her true meaning? Does it matter what her intent was? If no one had been able to decode it, would she still be here?

I don't feel like raising a fuss about it, because I personally did not like Arpeggio. (Maybe this was just my perception of her. I always got a bad vibe from her, and maybe I was wrong to listen to my gut feeling about her. I'm not trying to insult someone who's gone, I'm just stating that we never really hit it off, which anyone can see from the conversation threads where she and I never really had a direct conversation.) But if it had happened to someone I knew and liked on h2g2, I'd probably protest. Maybe? This issue is as unclear as the XXX'ed out message that got Arpeggio banned.

How do y'all feel?

I didn't know Arpeggio... could you explain what happened?

I'll try to give an accurate description, but someone will accuse me of bias. Oh well. If you want a truly unbiased account, wait and see if Fragilis writes it up in next week's h2g2 Post. She can maintain objectivity better than me. But I'll try...

Within a few days of joining h2g2, Arpeggio began topping the list of 24 hour Longest Average Posts. She apparently made friends with lots of people, because there are ten or twelve people angrily protesting her suspension.

Within a few weeks of joining, Arpeggio was involved in an argument in a Peer Review discussion about "Intelligence," which caused Playboy Reporter, the original author of the entry, to temporarily quit h2g2. Some people thought that Playboy Reporter had been criticized too harshly by Arpeggio and other reviewing peers. Some people felt that Playboy Reporter was criticized accurately and that he couldn't stand the heat.

Within about 4 or 5 weeks (I think), Arpeggio was given a warning and later a one week suspension. The warning and suspension involved complaints about Arpeggio writing offensive things. Some people defended Arpeggio because the offensive things were sometimes written by one of her 20,000 "documented" personality fragments. (On her personal website off h2g2, she describes her multiple personalities, as well as her experience with "The Agency," a secret branch of a foreign military which could assassinate her if she explains too much about MILITARY MIND CONTROL.) For example, one of the posts that got her warned or suspended was written by a four year old personality inside of her. Some people felt that she should not be suspended because a four-year-old doesn't know any better.

There was a lot of discussion and protest during the week she was suspended, eventually resulting in the question of whether researchers would be punished for posting messages on h2g2 from suspended researchers. (See the bottom of the House Rules for the new rule/clarification.)

Arpeggio was back on the site and active for a few days, maybe a week max, when suddenly there was an announcement by Mark Moxon on Community Soapbox saying that she had been banned for life. (See the discussion thread "Lifetime suspension." I'm sure it will still be hopping with activity.)

Since then, five to ten other researchers have threatened to leave in protest.

The weird part is that final "offensive" message that Arpeggio posted. (You can read the full text of it still on the "Lifetime suspension" discussion, which makes you wonder how very offensive it really is?) It appears that Arpeggio wrote a nasty message about Mark and Peta, then thought better of it and censored herself, putting XXX's through most of the message. However, there were just enough letters left strategically showing for the nasty message to still be deciphered. For example, one of the nastiest bits may or may not translate as "God help her offspring" (referring to Peta's kids).

But in order to get to the offensive message, you really had to sit down and practically decode it. The original thing looks like garbled nonsense, because the majority of letters in the message are XXX'ed out.

Don't take my word for it. Check out that discussion on Community Soapbox for the full story. I don't really mean to be slanting the story, but I still feel ambivalent about the whole thing. It seems like the kinds of things Arpeggio would say, and after seeing her in action and hearing about that first suspension, a betting man would not have put money on her staying out of trouble for a long time. (Or is it just the conspiracy of Mark and Peta claiming that she caused trouble repeatedly? In spite of other disagreements I've had with them, I don't see it this time.)

And yet it still nags at me: how can you ban someone for a post where almost all of the message is XXX'ed out? If someone had not decoded it and "yikesed" the entry, then probably no one else would have noticed or understood the message. Is that really bad enough to suspend someone permanently? And if it's that bad, why is the "decoded" version of the message still around? (I know they want it visible to explain to Arpeggio's supporters why they felt necessary to ban her, but if it's not offensive enough to remove from view, is it bad enough to merit banning her?)

I still have mixed feelings.

Hey Subcom, I'm still a Zaphodista, so my views ought to count for something, I hope.

While I'm here I might as well also comment on a message you just left somewhere else, to the 'lifetime suspension' thread, in response to my own message. You say things to the effect that if people's lives or souls are at stake they shouldn't waste their time trying to be helped here. You also said that if people are so sensitive that suspension from h2g2 could damage their souls or life they are too sensitive to function in society anyway.

Let's first start with LeKZ's life, of which we know little, having only very limited resources from which to get any idea at all.

You seem to not lend much credence to the MMC angle. Well don't be too hasty in your judgement on that. From my own conversations with LeKZ, on h2g2 and off, I can tell you that they know one heck of a lot about the human mind, its mechanisms and how they can be influenced. Their experiences, as recounted in their poetry and narrations, ring true. If MMC exists at all then that is how it would be applied. Her descriptions of combat situations are also very realistic indeed.

And forget if you wish about the MMC - read about abuse as a child, about anorexia, self injury, multiplicity and so on. These people know what they talk about alright. Understandably they are confused, but try to read past that.

In my own case the things LeKZ talked about resonated so strongly with my own life experiences that I very rapidly started to feel very close to them. I may be wrong about this but I do feel that there was a very strong bond forming between us just before all hell broke loose.

I am the person who posted the message from them that led to the instatement of the new rule.

Now here's the thing - to get back to your *other* comment, the one quoted above: no psychiatrist, policeman, priest or shaman or what have you could help them. Their problems are too way out. Family - reread their history and rethink that suggestion. Friends? Yes. But they are socially isolated. Many of their friends in fact keep contact over the internet, so it seems to me. One of our channels for helping her has now been stopped up. The thing is they could have been helped much better over here than they can be helped by emails. They need to be out, in public, in some kind of society, to be heard and seen. They need that so that they would not feel like a nothing and a nobody any more.

So that brings us to another point - they do indeed seem not to be able to function in society. The mistake they made was to believe that this place would be *nicer* than 'real' society. Why did they think that? Because they are a fan of Douglas Adams' and think this is a brilliant idea - and also, this community *is* a very very nice one. It is set up in a way seeming to guarantee niceness. It seems like a very safe and comforting place for a vulnerable person to be. Ask me. I am also a very sensitive and vulnerable person. I am also mentally unstable and entirely incapable of functioning in *ordinary* society. And up till now I have been having tremendous fun over here, I have been getting along with everybody, just super. It really does seem to be easier to find a meaningful kind of life and role here than in 'real life'. It can be a stepping stone to a more active social life. I don't think at all that it is confusing and anarchic. So I don't think their initial hope, of being able to find some sort of meaningful social life here, was misplaced. What happened afterwards seem so much more crueller because of that - it could have been so, so, very different. What happened seems monstrous, a travesty. It was unnecessary. I have been very intimately involved in all this and it does seem that there have been misunderstandings and overreactions that could have all been cleared up with only a little bit more patience and effort on all sides. I blame nobody - I don't specifically blame the italics. You may see the blame directed at the italics because you're involved with the Zaphodistas, but I did not mean it that way, and many others also did not. I.M.H.O. the blame goes everywhere, but the goal is not to find someone to punish but to set the matter straight, to achieve justice.

I will say a lot more about rules, and enforcing the same rules for everybody, and whether that is just and fair or not. Just something to ponder - if the underlying principle of the rule does not apply equally to everybody then the rule is not one that can be fairly applied across the board. Just for a very stupid example, seeing as I've been having a conversation about weight lifting, a rule in powerlifting used to be that you had to wear shoes while bench pressing. That has something to do with the leg drive when pushing from the bottom but whatever ... now this story is not entirely accurate since it's not the facts that matter but the example, the principle. Basically, there then came a guy who had no legs and broke the record in the bench press but was disqualified because he did not wear shoes. It was entirely ridiculous, of course. Same rule, different people = injustice.

My own ideal would be that we should make this site as open, as accommodating, as possible, to everybody. People don't all have equal self control. In the case of LeKZ self control is an extremely touchy issue. To them (and this is just my opinion - I so wish they could be here to speak forthemselves) control=censorship=oppression=abuse=manipulation=violation=brutalization=evil. Because they are a multiple, self-control to them means some personalities have to exert force over others. Reread their history to get an idea of what associations they have with this kind of exertion of force. You see it is really a case of a different situation existing. Try to make such a person live by 'ordinary' people's rules and they simply have no chance at all to do anything worth anything.

In the end to justify the status quo you have to retreat to a position where you call into question everything they say about themselves, and that is tantamount to denying their validity, their humanity.

Back to this: what help could LeKZ have had on this site? One heck of a lot. Help from me and from many others. This could have been worth incredibly much to them. This they are now denied.

And from the other angle LeKZ could have done an incredible amount of good here, to help people over here. They could have helped me more than any psychiatrist or any number of psychiatrists in this or any other country would have been able to. It simply would have worked much, much better when done in the context of an open and accepting community than it would work done one-on-one by email. Not to mention that they seem now to be so distracted by this business that the entire atmosphere of helpfullness and support does not exist any more.

From what happened I truly believe that it was never LeKZ's intention to cause trouble. They simply react very much more vehemently to things than other people. That I can understand and I don't think it's a crime. Things were pushed much too far, and to understand the final straw that broke the camel's back you really need to go look closely to all the different conversations that led up to it. For my own part I am willing to look beyond shortcomings and awkward things for the sake of what good there was, and might have been.

I've tried to keep an open mind about the question of multiple personalities. I've tried to think of the problem in terms of the rules being applied consistently, talking about what Arpeggio has done and not speculating about how her multiple personalities might influence this. However, there are some things on her off-h2g2 website that make me question her credibility, not just about her 20,000 personalities, but whether anything she says can be trusted. Maybe her life really reads like a spy novel, and maybe there really are people from a secret military organization who will assassinate her if she reveals anything more about the MILITARY MIND CONTROL that is prominently and repeatedly mentioned on her site, but which would be too dangerous for her to discuss at length.

I've known a few pathological liars, and dealing with them has made me leary of automatically believing what people tell me. I don't find Arpeggio's MILITARY MIND CONTROL stories credible. Seeing one story that's a problem brings into question all other things she might say. If she has 20,000 documented personality fragments, which of those fragments do should we trust enough to tell us about documenting the other 19,999? I also worry about how much "help" Arpeggio might have given to others on h2g2. She exhibits a high vocabulary, seems intelligent in some ways, but which of those 20,000 personality fragments is dispensing advice on diseases, psychology, pharmaceuticals? Her problems are so severe that they cannot be treated by doctors, friends, family, anyone, yet she can be trusted to advise others on what pills to take? When shopping for anti-psychotic medicines like Risperdal, should one take advice from a user of those medicines, someone who by definition has been unable to distinguish fantasy from reality?

So I've been trying to think of this event in terms of hypotheticals. If a person had 20,000 personality fragments, should they be treated differently on h2g2?

It would be nice if h2g2 could work as therapy for people who have nowhere else to turn. But even if it were appropriate to make exceptions for special people, this would also have to balance against the need to "protect" the whole community from offensive posts.

For example, if a person has 20,000 personality fragments operating in them, some young, some old, some intelligent, some less intelligent, would it be safe to say that some are actually mean and some are not? How far should Arpeggio be allowed to go? How much should she be allowed to get away with? If one mean personality started posting links to porn or celebrity morgue photos, trolling, posting lots of copyrighted articles, breaking whatever rules, then should she be excused because she can't help it? I'm not saying she would do anything like that. I'm trying to understand how much special treatment you think she should be given. I think for the good of the community, all of her personalities, any of her personalities should adhere to the same rules as the rest of us. If that hurts her feelings, then so will a lot of minor things in real life. There is no emotional bubble we can put around her to protect her from bad vibes, money problems, stress, etc. And if they give her different rules on h2g2, it will come at the cost of other people suffering more flames from her.

I don't believe there has been a group of people persecuting Arpeggio, as some have said. I believe she has consistently written posts that were aggressive, antagonistic, and you can still see it on her latest posts in the yahoo n2g2 group. Anyone who has doubts about whether she has been offensive in the past should read her posts over there.

Subcom, I'd just like to comment on a couple of points.

The first regards the split personalities. While I have great sympathy for people with mental disorders, and I feel strongly that they should not be discriminated against or marginalised on the basis of their illness, I also recognise that the staff (and community) of h2g2 are not trained professionals, and therefore can not be expected to deal effectively with the unique needs of people in those types of situation. For an untrained person to distinguish the different personalities is often difficult or impossible, because (as I understand it) the differences are often minutely subtle. I don't think the fact that the personality that made the comment was four years old excuses that behaviour - after all, it was at that stage merely a temporary suspension, and that is a good way to teach a four-year-old about bad behaviour.

As for the message, I haven't yet visited the thread to read it, but from what you have said the suspension was justified. After all, this was not pre-emptive moderation, it was that very thing Zaphodistas want so dearly: community based moderation. Somebody, not a moderator, yikesed the post. It was not the management imposing their will, but a genuinely offended member of the community - isn't that the way it was? The way it should be?

As I said, I don't have the full details, I'm commenting on secondhand info. If you don't think I know what I'm talking about, then you're probably right

But what about the phrase "lifetime suspension"? Isn't that just a ban? And if so, why use the euphemism - I guess it's on par with the decision to call "censorship" moderation. So much more friendly, even to the point of making something very ugly palatable to the community.

Good point. This was really "reactive moderation."

As for the semantics of "lifetime suspension" versus "ban," I don't see a big problem there. At least in this case, I don't think that any of the h2g2 staff would argue whether "lifetime suspension" means the same as "ban" (the way that some argued "moderation" is not "censorship).

Expecting a torrent of flame... this is a reply to the Researcher currently styled "Grief, Torment" etc.

Direct quotes: "From what happened I truly believe that it was never LeKZ's intention to cause trouble. They simply react very much more vehemently to things than other people. That I can understand and I don't think it's a crime. Things were pushed much too far, and to understand the final straw that broke the camel's back you really need to go look closely to all the different conversations that led up to it."
It's not a crime, it's a violation of rules you, I and LeKZ signed up to when we joined. Don't like the rules you agreed to abide by when you signed on? Get the rules changed. Or behave. Or leave. Those are the choices.
I don't have the time to look at all the conversations - although I've now spent about 30+ hours online looking at all the stuff I can find, and about six hours reading LeKZ's off-H2G2 website. I'm less qualified than some (you and others) but more qualified than many to comment. So...
Consider the following two things you said.
"Her descriptions of combat situations are also very realistic indeed."
"And forget if you wish about the MMC - read about abuse as a child, about anorexia, self injury, multiplicity and so on. "
Consider the consistency of these two comments. Have you ever served in any military unit of any kind? Any unit involved in *front-line combat*, where a person experiencing 20,000 personalities, severe eating disorders, self-harm, well-documented depression and an obvious difficulty dealing in any way with other people, would not be discharged IMMEDIATELY as a severe risk to the other members of their unit? On the other hand, how many "very realistic indeed" descriptions of combat are there in thousands upon thousands of books written by real veterans? I make no implication here about the truth or otherwise of any statement LeKZ makes about her past. But consider how effective in combat an anorexic/bulimic/whatever, depressed, self-mutilating woman would be, and ask yourself what *you* would say to a commanding officer who asked you to serve alongside such a person and possibly put your life in their hands.
Finally...
"My own ideal would be that we should make this site as open, as accommodating, as possible, to everybody. "
How much actual *cash* are you prepared to stump up to allow that to happen, Grief? I'm paying for this site. You aren't. LeKZ wasn't. One of the great things about being here is not being assaulted by pop-up adverts every 30 seconds - ever wondered why that's possible? That is possible because I and many others are actually paying to be here - and more to the point, many people you will never meet are paying to be here despite having no way of getting online. They pay, and they NEVER SEE THIS. As I've said elsewhere, if you want a community or therapy centre which operates by rules you like, you and anyone else are perfectly at liberty to start one. And pay for it. The BBC runs this site, for good or ill. I and everyone in the UK with a TV licence pays for it. There are therefore, of necessity, the sort of restrictions you get with a site run by a publicly funded organisation. The price is the rules. The prize is continuity. I registered before the BBC happened, and to be honest, wasn't that surprise when the hiatus happened. When the BBC took over, my immediate thought was "H2G2 is safe, possibly forever". My next thought was "Here come the thought police." But the point is WE'RE HERE. With thought police, but we're here. Some of us aren't anymore, but I honestly believe if you showed every single researcher for the Guide *everything* LeKZ posted and asked them, they'd back a ban. You simply cannot please all of the people all of the time. Since I'm clearly not a Zaphodista (or at least not yet...) I'm going to leave you all in peace now...
Have a drink (sorry don't know the smiley for beer) on me, by the way, Grief. This is in no way any kind of attack on you - but please consider carefully the points I made above.

"Since I'm clearly not a Zaphodista (or at least not yet...) I'm going to leave you all in peace now..."

Wait a minute! Is that supposed to mean a Zaphodista would argue endlessly, after all useful discussion has ceased and the whole thread degenerates into squabbles? I resemble that remark!

NO! No, I didn't mean that. Goodness, text is a poor way to communicate sometimes. No, what I meant was, in full:
"Since this is a Zaphodista hideout, and I've rather rudely interrupted with an opinion which marks me as clearly NOT a Zaphodista, (which I did because I think lurking with unsaid opinions is somehow rude), I won't bother you all any more with my blather, and instead apologetically withdraw, my piece said..."
The not yet just meant I haven't suffered moderation - yet.

All right, then we're cool still. I agree with the basic ideas you mentioned to "Grief," but I would have phrased things a little more delicately.

By the way, any non-Zaphodistas lurking who feel like posting here, please do. Don't let the name "Zaphodista hideout" fool you. I know everything posted on h2g2 is public, and won't consider it an invasion if you want to join the discussion. (For an example of how public these pages are, try a search of all h2g2 conversation threads using the keywords "damn zaphodistas." )

OK, given that those of us randomly floating through the site have been invited, I'll pop in and give my 2 cents about something.

Several people, including Subcom. Deidzoeb have said that they don't understand why/how someone can get in trouble for a self-censored post. After all, we self-censor around here all the time, don't we? However, it's been obvious for awhile (to me, anyway) that moderators react one way to self-censoring of words that the BBC considers "inappropriate" although they are not truly offensive (i.e., swear words and anatomical parts).

Truly offensive words and phrases (i.e., heated racial or sexual slurs), however, are just as offensive with the little stars in place, and postings with self-censored versions of these words most often seem get moderated out of existence. As I learned back in elementary school, you get in just as much trouble for hurling insults at the teacher in Pig Latin as you would have if you said them in English.

Thus, it's reasonable in my mind that if I wrote something that was obviously insulting and just XXXd out the vowels or the middle, I'd still get in trouble for it -- after all, my message still would have hurt some of the people who read it, a big hulk of whom would have no problem seeing past the Xs.

Of course, if I had posted a message where *every* letter was an X, it's entirely possible that it would still get moderated - after all, Bubblish gets moderated. However, it's unlikely that anyone would be potentially offended by it. Same thing if the paragraph it was all Xs and I just added 2 or 3 letters in.

Once you add a few more letters, you run the rather large risk that someone will assume that they know what the message means even though they don't -- they may be expecting that any four letter word ending in a "k" is a swear word, for example, when you really meant to say "pick" or "rock". If someone is offended at this point, I'd be annoyed that they're basically putting words in my mouth. On the other hand, I would have set myself up for just such a situation with my post.

At some point, though, there are enough letters added in that someone can figure out what I'm saying. At that point I'd consider myself responsible if someone looked at the post, puzzled out the message, and was offended or hurt.

Which of these pseudo-categories this whole deal falls into I'm not sure -- it would be interested to see what a professional cryptographer or someone like that said.


Mikey

Mikey, good point. We see potential insults like f'r or w*nker starred out by the moderators, but I don't know how they've dealt with posts that direct these words towards another researcher. Writing, "You are a mother f****r," might get the post removed instead of just starred out. I guess that's the difference in this case.

And some people claim that Arpeggio really did not intend the message that has been "translated" for us, that her original message was random spaces and letters and XXX's. I don't quite buy it.

Hello,

I'm not a Zaphodista either (I lost my temper and resigned a while back. Not an important story though, and Subcom Deidzoeb has my utter respect now), but I'll sneak into here anyway.

While we try to make H2G2 as welcoming as possible, there are certain contradictory aspects that make that difficult or impossible to achieve. For starters, there is an editorial process involved where people will receive constructive criticism on entries they've written. No matter how fragile you may feel, if your article is not sufficient for the Guide, you will receive criticism on it, and some people are not well at taking that. In addition, some people can get a little too excessive or may give criticism in what later turns out to be inappropriate ways (mainly because they don't know who the recipient is or how they react to criticism). Finally, we're all writing little text messages to each other, and we don't know how people feel, what is serious and what's a joke, etc. As a result, it's no real surprise that Peer Review was the setting for a lot of the drama that occurred. Misunderstandings occurred and blew up. I'm just a volunteer as a Scout. I can not and will not provide counselling or intervention, since this is not my job and I will not provide faulty counselling to people who need real help from serious professionals.

Don't get me wrong. I liked Arpeggio, and I feel a lifetime ban is not called for (mainly, I think the rules are a bit excessive, not that they should not apply to her). However, I also believe her supporters have been kinder to her excesses than others in the population and sometimes too quick to characterize any detractors as anti-intellectual mobs out on a stalking rampage. I think Arpeggio was intelligent and could've done a lot here, but she could also be pretentious and infuriatingly disruptive at times. In short, she was neither a saint or a demon, but a person like the rest of us. So, I treated her as one. I regarded her as an equal, not as a superior person or someone who was handicapped and thus deserved a lot more understanding and leeway than other people. This may sound like I'm being insulting, but I think I was being anything but (in the same way I would open doors but not push down the street someone in a wheelchair). Yes, she had serious problems and I sympathize with her there, but I can't advocate egregiously special treatment for anyone here.

And yes, I think she wrote the message with the decoded intent, and I'm not even sure one of her personalities can be blamed for it either, since it seems like several different personalities mentioned it to Mark besides the one who wrote it. So I think she knew what she was doing and did it. While I'm not really a fan of moderation or censorship, I also understand the need to limit speech sometimes in attacks like this (or, "the right to swing your arm ends when it hits my face"). It's one thing to complain about H2G2 policy. It's another thing to call the Italics bad names. Still, I hope we can avoid a chilling effect on any dissent or the feeling that minority opinions are not welcome here.

Yours,
Jake

A small interjection about intent. LeKZ posted something that looked a bit like this...
"HXX XXXX IX TXXT DXXXY XN XXX WXXXXW?"
Doesn't look like much, does it? Most people would probably ignore it. Some people can't resist a puzzle, however, and given that you probably need a certain turn of mind to hang around here (you all know what I mean) then the proportion of inveterate puzzle solvers is likely to be *way* above average. You don't need to be a professional cryptographer - all you need is one of those gadgets that help you do crosswords. Type in WXXXXW and it'll give you a list of possible words. Do the same for the rest of the message and you get a list of options for every word. Now take into account that LeKZ, despite any problems she may have had, in all her enormous contributions almost never posted so much as a spelling mistake, let alone bad grammar, and that would narrow down your options a great deal. Certain apologists tried to generate "alternative interpretations" of certain sections of the offending message, but they weren't coherent or grammatical, something LeKZ was scrupulous about. So the intent *seems* clear. Just enough letters were left in to make alternative interpretations nonsense, enough were taken out to require significant effort on the part of a decoder. Life ban? I honestly don't know, but since this occurred less than a week after a suspension, I suppose you have to ask how many chances a person must be given.

"How much is that doggy in the window?"

I have an adjunct to Post 8, but since it's likely to be a bit off-topic I'm posting it somewhere else. If you're interested, you'll know how to find it...

Hoovooloo, too cryptic for me: "if you're interested, you'll know where to find it." What are you talking about? Nobody here is uptight enough to complain about topic drift. Please say it here or give us a link to what you're talking about.

oh. sorry, just had a specific answer directly intended for "Grief, Torment" etc., and rather than blather here I've posted directly to their space. Didn't mean to sound cryptic, I just thought that if anyone was *that* interested in a conversation I was having they could click on my name above and find the conversation from my space...
I've only just finished doing the post to Grief, so until two minutes ago, that wouldn't have worked.
I must type faster....!

(Sudden recollection of an interview question once put to Isaac Asimov: "What would you do if you were able to know the date and time of your death?" - "I don't know. I'd probably type a little faster...")

I'd never even heard about LeKZ before all this blew up, i don't particularly care about why she wrote it; personally i hope she wrote it to highlight the issue of censorship, the HOW being more important than the WHY or what. I'll confess that i couldn't be bothered reading all her posts, all the furore, hell i can't even understand how it all came about. so really i have no interest in the personalities involved (although I understand LeKZ has apologised to Peta and Mark) what interests me more is the arbitrary way she was thrown off the site - where was her right to reply? Despite the big cheeses protestations (and publicity materials) is this really an on-line community? the word 'community' is mentioned at least 5 times on the home page. sorry but how's this sense of community being built up? a true community participates, in whatever limited way, in the way decisions are made. All this might be very airy-fairy and i appreciate that the BBC own the site and can decide who plays in their sand-pit but surely this incident asks questions about the whole purpose and future direction of the site.