First, I'll direct your attention to the black panel at the top of the index. While I do read the board frequently, I'm not actually maintaining it at the moment, so I'm not interested in engaging in long email debates. In fact, at this time I do not monitor my personal somersault email address at all, though the ssforums one goes to all admins.
Second, there seems to be some confusion about how this forum is run, maintained, and financed. I have had communication recently which hints that this is some sort of spy site, set up to gather information. Also, some posters and prospective posters seem to think this is a private invitation-only site. It seems that they have not read the Introduction.
Let me, therefore, clarify a few things.
- The Lounge is a public site, available to all well behaved posters. Prior permission is not required for anyone to post, nor is registration required. The only advantages of registration are that no one can masquerade using your nick, and that you can post at times when the Forum is temporarily restricted to counter spam attacks. This is very rare, and happens less than once a year, so far.
- The Lounge and Tech Forum are not expensive to run, and some of the expense is covered by a BL/GL group as a public service. Other financing is no one's business but mine and I will not reply to questions about it. Yes, some of it comes out of my own pocket and always has done.
- The server, which also hosts other BL/GL sites, is located in an undisclosed location outside of North America. You connect to the server via one of two proxies, one in Sweden, the other in Holland. (I can say this because anyone with the Flagfox addon for Firefox can easily see the location. The proxies are also BL/GL owned and are secure and carefully monitored. Because of the proxy system, the actual location of the server can not be determined by anyone.
- It is not necessary to ask permission to invite friends to post here.
- All Somersault services are public, including the Guides and the Forums. The only exception is the backup forums which require registration to post (but not to read). This is to control spammers since we don't have as sophisticated tools to operate the backup forums as we do for the main forums. This means that you are welcome to post links to the Forums and Guides in other locations. Prior permission is not required.
- Your IP address, for what it's worth, is viewable by admin (i.e. myself and KRB). If there are ever additional moderators, they will have full control over posts but they will not see IP addresses. Remember, though, that the information gleaned from IP addresses is not very useful; only law enforcement (and only with a warrant) can associate a particular IP with a particular client. We certainly can not. In point of fact, neither KRB nor I bother to check IP addresses unless there is a problem that needs to be controlled; it's just too much damned work!
- I am not associated with law enforcement (except that they bug me once in a while), nor is KRB. Together we know in real life a significant number of BLs, and they can confirm this. I have been running this forum for almost 10 years now, and the Tech Forum for 11 or more. No one has ever been outed or compromised by posting on either Forum since their inception.
Perhaps that will clarify some of the items that I've been asked about in email.
Somersault
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