General Chat

its gone red wot does that mean

Good night Deb, I'll be joining you now as well. Fiona. x

Not gone quite yet Fiona! Where are you to also be going to bed? Deb

Good night everyone. Please add to this thread. A good dedate is fine, but if I see contentious, underhanded remarks tomorrow I will pull the thread. Deb

I believe it's a little later here than where you are, about 3 hours if I'm not mistaken. I'm in St Clair Shores, Michigan. Just outside of Detroit. Fiona.x

Fiona, Yes you are 3 hours ahead! 9.44pm here. I'm up at 6am, so the need to head to bed. Have a good restful sleep. Deb

Goodnigth deb and fiona................xx................i'll leave you with this one...............True friendship is a plant of steady growth

Thank you! You too Deb. Night. Fiona. x

Hi Deb, I admire you for saying what you feel and I agree with a lot of what other people have said. As for people 'not being forced' to leave. I disagree with that, totally. Some have felt forced to leave. Like my pal Felicity, I'm posting less and less so I expect, eventually, I will fade away as well. Gwynne

I can fully understand why people are put off from posting threads or replying to others. Quite often in threads suggesting that things have changed / are not the same etc., there is reference to all the good people who have left or it being the ones who made the boards have left. Well being someone who has been here for over 4 years and contributed to all boards in many ways be it posting, replying, doing lookups or responding to appeals, I feel that myself and many others are not considered as being an acceptable part of what makes the boards good. Please do be careful how you word things as there are many people who have been here from almost the start or have joined along the way who help to make the boards but may not be as frequent or as obvious as some but that does not make our contribution any less. Jacky :-) PS Where did David's reply go that followed this ???

Good Morning people, I will add that at times I have felt intimidated, scared to add my point of view for fear of reprisal, I sometimes feel totally ignored, one of the only threads that I have to say I am answered on is the 'fibromyalgia thread' perhaps that is because we all have something in common. I am an incredibly shy person, I don't sit at my PC for long and just pop back every hour or so to read whats happening, so sometimes will miss answering someones very valid point because it has slipped way down a busy thread, I do feel that some of the very regular people do ignore others and stick to answering only those people that they know well from the boards or have met at meets, I just feel that sometimes the banter between people is in there own language of humour and means absolutely nothing at all to others on the board. Gillie xx

No idea Jacky. Gillie xx

Just nudging, and Lil, in my opinion, you haven't got the point of this thread :-))

See you found out how it's done Debs.

jacky, I agree with you, it is a bit galling to keep reading that all the good people have gone. What does that make us who are left? And, as I said on Em's leaving thread. I do wonder if all those people would have left if there had not been somewhere else provided for them to go. maybe if they had all stuck it out we could have got the board back to where it was. as for ignoring people or being ignored. it is not quite like being at a party and people ignoring you. At a party the person next to you is more or less static. On a message/chat board the thread moves fast. often you are ignored because several people are posting at once and your post is lost in the influx of postings. it has happened to me. When it does I usually shout 'am I being ignored?' when people will hurriedly apologise for not 'seeing' you there. Please believe that it is not usually intentional. Debs, Mike Chambers left when he got fed up with being hounded. his Mum died and he was very upset and vulnerable and some people would not leave him alone making him lose his temper and getting him banned. This was about 18 months ago now and the people who hounded him were established members not so called 'newbys'. He stayed in touch with a couple of us for a while but have not heard from him for ages. Ann Glos

I agree with Ann It IS rather disheartening to read about all the 'good ones' going. Some of the rest of us are ok you know!!! I also get disheartened reading threads about how this board has 'lost something' - surlely it's up to us all to keep the boards a pleasant place to be??

I wouldn't say that ALL the good people have gone, but we've certainly lost quite a few nice people - that's not to say that there aren't STILL a lot of nice people. I do agree thought that the board is unrecognisable from a year or two ago, and not in a good way (just my opinion, other opinions are available).

I will delete my post as the poster has deleted some of the message that was showing this morning before i left for work Lilxx

Perhaps 'all the good ones have gone' is a generic phrase and not to be taken too literally. Besides which, if anyone is 'here' but not posting much they have effectively 'gone' too. I don't think it's a case of not being strong enough to stick up for one's self either. I've found that, for the most part, if anyone ever needed to stick up for themselves, the thread quickly becomes abusive, so I work on the 'discretion is the better part of valour' theory and refuse to be drawn in to that kind of exchange, even to defend myself. True, things change but it is a bit galling when people complain that there's no this, that or the other and when others, myself included, try to provide it, it gets ignored. I'm like many other members - I look in, I read, I comment much less than I used to, refuse to rise to any baiting and that suits me fine. I know who I like to talk to on here, and I know who likes to talk to me, and if there's an occasional misunderstanding, that's the downside of cyberspace. If and when I everntually stop contributing altogether, I doubt that anyone will notice or really be bothered and that's fine too. After all, this is cyberspace! :-) In the meantime, the boards are what we make them, collectively, a kind of gestalt, whether we like it or not.

I can't remember how long I've been a member of GR but I still to this day feel like an outsider looking in, sad I know but I just don't seem to be able to be as quick witted or spend as long as some do on the boards, half the time I haven't got a clue what anyone is talking about when they share banter, so can't possibly join in. Gillie xx