Everybody goes through ups and downs. Families, people and yes, even communities. We all have to grapple with people who act in ways we cannot fathom, and try and make sense of senseless actions. I experienced this feeling of trying to make sense of something that can’t be made sense of – my best friend’s suicide 15 years ago. You can try all you want, but you’d be spinning your wheels. An irrational act is, by definition, something that won’t have rationality as a part of it.

We all have to live in a world where we have to find a way to get along with others. We learn from our first day in kindergarten that there will be some people we enjoy spending time with who often become our friends or more. We discover others that we don’t feel strongly about in any particular manner, and another group of people whom, for whatever reasons, we have difficulty getting along with. This is the nature of human social interaction – it is unrealistic to believe otherwise.

We do, however, have many choices available to us on how we respond to people whom we don’t get along with. All of these choices are within the realm of our choosing as mature, responsible adults. If we respond to a flame online, we make that choice. It’s not made for us, nobody makes us do anything we ourselves do not want to do. Reinforcing negative behavior usually escalates an incident – just like pouring gasoline onto a fire. The best thing to usually do in most instances is to simply walk away. That’s why we have the “ignore” functionality in the community, by the way. It’s a tool, available for use at your disposal, to try and help you deal with people whom you’re not getting along with.

When you join a community such as ours, your also take on a certain set of responsibilities. We’ve tried to lay out these responsibilities in our “Community Guidelines,” but we also have some that perhaps need to be clarified due to the recent incident. The most evident is the expectation that no matter what people say here, it stays here (unless it’s some sort of illegal activity, in which case, it’s completely legitimate to contact someone). Members have a responsibility to one another here. Members should always strive, no matter what, to respect one another and one another’s opinions (no matter how much they disagree with them). Members have a responsibility to not take something that’s going online here in our private little community into the real-world. Members have a responsibility to not violate another member’s trust or privacy.

It greatly saddens me to inform you that Sleepswithbutterflies was culpable in the recent wi_fighter incident. While she herself did not relay the information to the agency, one of her friends she confided in did and she was fully aware her friend was taking this action. She is profusely sorry for what she did and takes and accepts full responsibility for her actions in this incident. As previously promised, she has been banned from the community for her extremely poor judgment in this matter.

In the next few weeks, we’ll propose a number of initiatives to help people understand the role of privacy in a community such as this and poll members on different technology options that may help curtail such incidents in the future. As others have pointed out, however, no technological solution can stop someone from doing what has happened here. If one member chooses to violate the community’s trust and expectation of privacy, there’s little that can be to stop them. So one of the things I’ll be talking about in more depth is how to be able to open up online about things that are important to you, without revealing enough personally identifiable information so that someone could use it against you in the future. It can be done, it just takes a little practice and vigilance.

On behalf of the entire administrative team here, I want to apologize for this member’s behavior. We place our faith and trust in a member, and they let us down. That’s no reason to gang up on her, though, nor to suggest that we should never put our faith in other members again in the future. It is human nature to want to trust, to tentatively put our hearts on the line another time, and hope that we can keep our future expectations in check. I sincerely appreciate and enjoy your diversity here, your willingness to open your hearts and give to those in need, and I would never want to lose that aspect of our community. Please don’t let one poor judgment call change your belief in others, and your hope and trust in our community.

Yours most truly,
John