Quote - Xeno there's nothing assinine about comparing postings made that are deliberate in their baiting nature to the same sort of behavior that this case involves. Sorry if you consider it assinine or naive but we don't all subscribe to your belief that only the strong should survive in the forums. Courtesy is something that everyone should learn to use, including yourself.

While I fully agree that courtesy and respect should be given to everyone, I couldn't disagee more that one can draw any sort of direct correlation between this situation and the one mentioned in Missouri.  That's a lot like saying that someone firing spitballs at you through a straw is exactly the same as someone shooting a bazooka at you.  Ok, both are similar in the most basic tenant, you are being shot at.  But the level of damage one could reasonably expect from a spitball is nowhere near the level of damage one could expect from a large, explosive anti-tank round.  It simply makes no sense to compare the two.

In much the same fashion, the level of damage one could expect from what is from all outward appearances just a poorly chosen remark can in no way be compared to the level of damage one might expect to inflict with a constant, vicious, repetitive cycle of overt and blatent harrassement.

Hey, I'm all for treating everyone with dignity and respect, but lets face it, there are more than a few people out there who are just oversensitive and will blow most anything you say way out of proportion, even when the remarks you made had little or nothing to do with them or there personal situation at all.

So while I'd love the message bases to be a happy place where everyone always got along and respected one anothers point's of view, sadly in the real world I recognize that such just isn't the case.  And while I try to avoid posting anything that is going to seriously hack someone else off, sadly it seems that doing so is nearly impossible.  No matter what you say someone is bound to take it the wrong way, blow it way out of proportion, get overly defensive and even downright nasty about it.

Case in point, recently in another thread I started discussing the possibility of developing an open source replacement for Poser, and almost immediatly I was verbally assualted by about half a dozen posters accusing me of all sorts of things, up to and including trying to perpetrate some sort of fraud on the community as a whole.  All of this for merely discussing the possibility of writing a free program that might at some point replace Poser in functionality.

You'd have thought I had egged there mom's houses and shouted obscenties at them at the top of my lungs considering the way they reacted and some of the downright nastiness that was posted. 

But hey, such is life.  I'm not crying about it, I have no intention of letting a few nasty, childish individuals run me out of the message base nor will I allow them to dissuade me from starting work on FAST.  I just chalked it up nothing more than a small group of people who really needed to get an emotional reality check and moved on.  I'm simply suggesting that Sean do the same.

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...