Gah. Some people.
What the hell is up with everyone being so quick to take offence these days?
It’s kinda a long story, but please bear with me.
I belong to a forum for independent women small business owners. It’s a great resource, and we can all share advice and experiences. This forum has a “private” area, that’s only accessable by members, and not, say, Google or random customers. The point of having it is to be able to have discussion about ‘sensitive’ issues, without worrying about customers reading it. Issues that involve things like how much it actually costs to produce some products, discussions of future plans for the business, and the occasional rant someone posts about how an annoying customer has emailed them 47zillion times.
Lately there’s been some drama regarding who’s “allowed” to access the provate forums, originally stemming from one person copy/pasting posts from there and sending them to someone outside that forum, who then caused a big stink. Same ol’, same ol’.
So there began a discussion about how to make the private forums more secure Currently all you need to be given access is to provide your business number OR website address to the Admin. Since anyone and their dog can have a website, this was causing a few minor problems. Anyone and their dog can still have access to the public forum.
During the discussion, it was suggested that maybe also having a time/post count limit to join as well, because we’ve had instances of people joining the private forums only to snag all our personal info (which granted, isn’t all that personal: website address, maybe email) and then spammed everyone “advertising” their services. They have a “registered business”, but that’s not what the private forums are for, so someone thought maybe requiring members to have X number of posts, and/or have been a member for X length of time before they can apply to the private forums, to weed out the spammers and whatnot. I was one of the ones who voiced an amount of support for that idea, since I’ve seen it work quite well on other boards. It’s not a perfect system by any means, but it requires that anyone new actuallyinteract with other members, and everyone can get to know them for a little while before they get to jump right in to reading more personal information.
Well.
You’d think anyone who supported that idea had asked for a human sacrifice. People started going on and on about how it’s soooo unfair to new people to exclude them just because you don’t know a thing about them. Or how what we’re really saying is that some of us think we’re better than everyone else because we have more posts (which is obviously the only reason we support such an idea, of course).
OMG, call the whaaaambulance! It’s an emo-gency!
The thing that gets me is that these are all GROWN WOMEN! Business owners! More specifically, grown women business owners who run online businesses. You’d think they’d never been online before, what with being so shocked that anyone might disagree with them.