No, hold on, there is a link. I posted yesterday about the cowards posting death threats and abuse on Kathy Sierra’s excellent blog. The condemnation of this has been pretty widespread: even the BBC has reported on it.
Christopher Hawkins comments about how widespread abusive comments are on the Internet: “Visit any message forum on the web – go on, pick one at random, I’ll wait – and click through threads at random for 15 minutes or so. If you don’t see anyone making personal attacks on each other, you picked a real winner.”
This triggered two thoughts in my mind. Firstly, I’ve written some fairly provocative things on here, but no one as threatened to kill me – and I have the stats to show that some people are reading this. Is it a matter of time? Is it just because Kathy is a woman and more of a target? Or am I just too scary? I don’t know.
But secondly, and more importantly, the various forums I frequent related to my socially unacceptable habit of driving a vehicle with four driven wheels are largely devoid of that kind of abuse. Yeah, we have our spats occasionally, often over things as trivial as whether a Land Rover or a Jeep is the best off-roader. But I think the fact that at the end of the day, we rely on each other to rescue us from the mud means we have to keep things pretty civil!