Herewith my final farewell
I would like to use this opportunity to thank you all – both on JWD and JWR for eight great years and the many virtual friendships being here resulted in. Thank you Simon for letting me be a member on JWD all these years – you are doing a good work and have many great people now joining your forum from JWR.
Don’t pin me down on every word, but I am going to try to explain what lead to the demise and fall of JWR. As admin/mods we have the constant dealing with SPAM, Trolling, Creationist/Preaching, deciding on how far you let things go and when to reign in, having to ban persons, criticism on being too strict or too tolerant, name calling (Elders, GB), banned persons coming back over and over again with new sock-puppet accounts and more. It all comes with the turf, but at times it gets to you...
Recently we had weeks of sock-puppet reappearance, name calling, innuendos and under the belt criticism on how we were handling matters – and I think that is kind of were the breaking point was reached and the decision to close JWR. Those who did these things know it themselves well and I beg you to behave well on JWD.
The way in which it was shut down, I certainly in hindsight do not agree with, and am still hoping that Rifter will be able and willing to bring it online for a given period (e.g. one week) to allow everyone to download his/her personal posts and desired threads. From what I gather the reason for this manner of closure was as we felt that people were becoming too unnecessarily dependent on the forum and that one collective had been replaced by another. By sudden closure we were hoping that some would decide to let the past go and move on – and perhaps some will. I can tell you that even though I knew a few days in advance, I declined to download my research and material – close to 10K posts – as this would still somehow keep me attached – while I want a clean start. Viewing from my personal standpoint, perhaps I too soon agreed with the manner of closure. My sincere apology here for. I still am thankful to Rifter for the many years he lead JWR – and let me state for the record, that although he accepted some donations in the beginning, the last years with his own personally circumstances allowing, he no longer accepted donations and footed the costs of running JWR himself.
To Quote Elizabeth Smart: “Be happy...live your life...move forward and do all of the things that you want to do. Because by feeling sorry for yourself and holding onto the past and reliving it over and over and over again, that’s only allowing them to steal more of your life away from you and they don’t deserve that. They don’t deserve another single second more of your life. So you be happy and you move forward”
Closing with this quote to encourage you to move on whenever you feel you are ready for it and not to stay too long in a victim role. You are no longer victims of this cult, but the lucky ones to have made it out. Do your reading and research, decide what goals you have in your life and aim to achieve these.
Take care and be well – signing off, DS