I don't think anyone here needs to apologize. We are STILL a caring and compassionate group of people and when someone, ANYONE, claims that another member is in distress, it's natural for us to want to speak a few kinds words onto the situation.
That may be true, but do keep in mind that
those who bought into the story rushed their caring and compassionate words to the aid of someone who had just committed assault and battery, in a bar fight. That story pushed all the right buttons as if it were a cattle prod, a distraught wife, badmouthing the military, and the injustice of a corrupt small town police force.
That being said, no one needs to berate the others for expressing kind words. That serves no purpose other than to try and elevate themselves.
Nice try, but no. The purpose is to alert others so that they will look at things like this in the future with a jaundiced eye, so that maybe they won't be as gullible and so wide open to being duped like this again. It's kind of like those 8th grade tests from 1926 that you need a college degree to answer, and people read 'em and are shocked and awed, when the reality is all that crap is pure fiction.
Instead, the focus needs to be on what can be done to assure that something like this doesn't happen again.
Being a little more skeptical about unexpected and shocking news would be first on that list, dontcha think? Banning IP's, even entire ISP's is only marginally effective, since it's brain dead easy to get around a permanent ban and everything that goes along with it simply by using IP proxies and Web anonymizers, or for that matter, the built-in CTRL-SHIFT-P private Web browsing feature of Firefox. If you create too many hoops to jump through in order to register and get on the forums, a lot of good people will walk away. Forum registration should be a relatively inviting process, one of welcome and inclusion, but too many hoops or extended waiting periods all say the opposite.
The best way to deal with this kind of crap is to not buy into it in the first place.
Posting something on the Net is as easy as writing on the walls of a public rest room. You shouldn't just automatically believe it until it's proven false. Instead, you should assume it is false, unless there is proof that it's true. So I'm sorry if you or someone else feels berated, but this is the reality of the Internet
, and everybody just got a little dose of it.
