After receiving a concerned email about a post on this board threatening to expose some participants to their employees (as being disruptive elements), I did some reading of their posts. Although I completely sympathize with Simon here http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/ and have walked many miles in his shoes as an administrator for H2O from 1996 until present, I still was at a complete loss to assure this individual who sent me the email.
I get a gut feeling that Simon really wouldn't carry through this threat! Perhaps H2O moderators including myself were fortunate enough not to have been driven far enough to ever post such a perceived threat to disruptive elements, which in fact was a warning and not intended as a threat. I have posted a lot of angry things myself, addressed to those who were continuous sources of disruption. I could have easily gone over the edge and threatened to turn someone in to their employer myself! I didn't.
I'm therefore posting this experience I had during the last days of H2O before its traffic became too heavy for its ISP to bear, and they terminated our account abruptly. (I believe this was due to donations not sustaining increasing bandwidth charges, and bandwidth choking our dedicated server). I think my experience to follow will help those of you who are Jehovah's Witnesses, like myself, who have become lax over time in remaining anonymous.
The thunderbolt of "lightning" came in the form of an email to H2O addressed to myself -- yes my full legal name and evidence to tie me to H2O since its inception -- from an elder in a Los Angeles congregation who asked me to phone him. This elder had posted on H2O regularly himself, and his wife had posted there also.
The original Jehovah's Witness reformation group AJWR (Associated Jehovah's Witnesses for Reform) hosted a graffitti board in 1996 when H2O started. His wife found their site, read their reform newsletter, got swept up in the festive graffitti board atmosphere and posted there.
He found her posting one day when he was researching the web for a talk that he was about to give to his congregation. Before AJWR, this JW couple were true blue JWs who followed the party line to the letter, and strictly raised their kids to survive the "Los Angeles Sodom and Gomorrah school system." His wife's stumbling upon AJWR (pun intended) had led her husband from the office to read the site's reform newsletter, and to visit sites such as Kent Steinhaug's Watchtower Observer ( http://www.watchtower.observer.org/). Needless to say he was smart enough to use an anonymous proxy to do his surfing across the web. He's a businessman whom, it turns out, has since become heavily involved in the reform movement and has contacts to a few key people in the organization. The Society would dearly love to track these people down, needless to say.
His message to me in revealing my identity and ability to report me -- should he wish -- to my local congregation, was simple. He wanted to make me aware of the ease in which someone can track you down, if you don't take extreme precautions. Thanks to this very liberal elder (but NOT the one and only "Liberal Elder" who posted on H2O!), I have learned how to surf in such a manner that my identity is safe.
You can learn the techniques of surfing anonymously, if you feel that you have much to lose by having your employer notified of activities you trusted were confidential, or having your congregation notified.
You might find it interesting to know that H2O ( http://www.geocities.com/hourglass2.geo/) has a privacy policy and we encourage anonymity through allowing Guests to login and enter their screen name without registration. H2O is moderated and we have a written Forum Participation Policy and Privacy policy. The site policies and moderator setup is modeled after the paradigm of the pay-for-use online services such as America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe bulletin boards. The purpose of moderation is to protect freedom of speech by preventing abuses that could shutdown the site.
Simon, if you're reading this, I would personally love to see you adopt such a system to prevent the appearance of bias or inequality in your own moderating decisions. I want to stress that I'm not saying there is bias or inequality going on, but there is no method for outsiders to measure the levels of unbias and equality. There are no basic policies one can point to (preferably with a link) that basically answer those who wish to know why an action was taken. There is no site charter here like one finds on other web forums and Usenet newsgroups (incidentally, a charter was part of forming alt.religion.watchtower.reform and alt.religion.watchtower.judicial to carry reform and judicial discussion into the Usenet realm.
Friends, our livelihood and our social structure is at stake, and we owe it to our families and friends to protect our identities. Remember, if our employer fires us because they were notified of our activities on the web, it can destroy our lives. If our elders are notified, we can get disfellowshipped and have our families and friends shattered.
In closing, surfing anonymously can protect our precious lives, which are so fragile if we only knew. We are like Humpty Dumpty in the children's fairy tale, with Alice behind the looking glass in a topsy-turvy world of Watchtower reasoning with twists and turns continuously -- sitting on the high wall of the internet, not realizing just how far we could fall.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
and all the King's horses
and all the King's men
couldn't put Humpty together again.
I hope this helps. You've done well, Simon, and there are always opportunities to improve. I realize this forum is in its infancy, and maturity in site operations does not happen overnight.
Best wishes to you all,
Derrick
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
-- William Blake (Auguries of Innocence)