> My point was that I personally feel annoyed and disrupted almost every single day in RinkChat, and I basically just shake it off and go on with my life. But one night, Sam and I do something disruptive and annoying, and suddenly five or six people are offended to the point where some of them actually want to leave forever and some are so upset that they spend hours writing message forum posts explaining *why*? How wrong is THAT?

> -- Dave

Um. The last part of this post is obviously directed at me. I've been pretty bad at answering posts lately; it's taken a while to get this thing straightened out. Nevertheless --

I think what happened was that /for a brief moment/, /late last night/, people got angry. They said some things that they didn't really mean, like that they were leaving.

Today, we have seen that this anger did indeed last for only a brief moment. Certainly, I am no longer angry; furthermore, Rivikah (post 27299), Morris (post 27262) and Wormwood (post 27321) are no longer angry. In short, we just "shake it off and go on with [our] lives", as you have advocated.

Nevertheless, we sensed that Sam was uncomfortable with the fact that we were angry, even for a brief moment. He asked us /why/ we were angry. I for one felt that Sam was important enough to justify taking as long as it took to explain why, for that brief period of time last night, I felt angry. I certainly didn't write that post because I was "upset".

So you look at our reactions today, and ask "How wrong is that?" Well, I admit that I reacted somewhat extremely last night. I apologize for that. Yet you have said yourself that sometimes, in the heat of the moment, you find yourself "screaming out that everyone in the room is a 'retard'" -- but you don't mean it. And I don't think any of us meant what we said last night either.

Today, we are /not/ angry. I, at least, have said that I am sorry for what I felt last night and that I wish I had seen things more clearly. The people on this forum have tried their best to explain to Sam why they reacted as they did last night -- because Sam /asked/ them.

So, how wrong is that? I don't think it's wrong at all.

Instead, I think that this thread has served to bring closure to the situation that occurred last night. I think it's been successful in that, and that now that this misunderstanding (at least, in my case) has been /thoroughly/ rectified, we can all go on with our lives. And, I think that's good.

-SB