> I decided that I needed to write this to you all, mostly in light of this recent "Ressurection."
>
> For those of you who don't know me(as I am a rather recent addition to RinkWorks), my name is Sam. I go by the nickname HalfWitt because it would be confusing to go by 'Sam' for obvious reasons. I found out about RinkWorks from my beautiful girlfriend, Tess, and have been addicted to it from the beginning. I would think this is brief enough, so I'll move on to what I really want to say.
>
> First I must begin by thanking Sam.
> Tess let me read the email you sent her concerning this recent episode, and I must say thank you. Thank you for being such an amazing person and for caring so much about her. There are very few people I have met who are such kind, wise, and caring people. For all others reading this; You are very lucky to have Sam here. I hope that everyone else here knows what you are really worth.
>
> Next, I must thank everyone else here who has ever chatted with me, or posted to one of my comments, or anything else. It is so amazing to find such a collection of great people in an online community; especially one as close-knitt as this one. In the meager 18 years of my life, I have found that truly lifelong friends are very hard to come by, and even with my limmited experience here, I already know that there is an amazing amount of them here. Thankyou all for being the kind of people who watch each other's backs, and support each other when it's needed. This place is astounding, and I hope I never have to leave.
>
> Once again, Thank you all.
> Your fellow Rinkie,
> HalfWitt aka Sam

I want to add my thanks to those of HalfWitt, and say a few things deriving from the whole sorry mess which is the Twistinside Incident. First, whether or not it is already apparent to everyone, I think we owe Sam hugely for the amount of time and very personally stressful effort he has put in over the last few days to bring some possibility of closure to this incident, and to counsel and console those who were deeply affected by it. I was unaware until today of just how much Sam has been doing ever since this happened, not only for his own peace of mind but for the safety and peace of mind of this whole community, and I am sure there is much more involved which I will never know about. I have been a member of this community for over two years now, and this is the first incident of such devastating impact. Maybe not for everybody, but for enough people, and to a high enough degree, that I want to make sure it is *understood* as such even by the people who do not feel personally affected by it.

So, leading from this, I wonder if I could make a suggestion to forum regulars regarding the ethics thread and all its spin-offs. Please do not read this suggestion as being based on my own opinion of what we were discussing in those threads. What I want to say is this: the ethics thread contains a highly controversial topic and is generating a lot of heat and stress among some people. As it stands, this would be fine by me. We have had plenty of controversial threads before and it is part of what makes this community so good. BUT.

There is a time for controversy. There is a time for heated argument. There is a time for debating topics which are certain to cause stress and antagonism. And that time is not now. Like I said, don't take this as me slamming a thread I don't like. It has nothing to do with whether I like it or not. It is causing a huge amount of further unnecessary stress to people who are already coping with as much, and more, than they should be reasonably expected to cope with.

As an analogy, I love action movies with lots of big explosions and plane crashes and guns and scary people. But the studios were right to stop making them and screening them for a while after September 11. Yes, I still love freedom of speech, and reasoned debate, and huge crazy controversial forum threads, and all that good stuff. Right now, though, there are people in this community who do not need it in any shape or form, and at the risk of embarrassing Sam, he is one of them.

So at the risk of offending everybody all over again, I want to suggest that we all put the ethics thread and similar things on hold for a little while. I will not be posting any more to that thread right now, although there were many things I wanted to post.

Many people, at various times, have expressed their gratitude for this site and wished they could give something back to Sam for all his work here. I think this would be an appropriate way of saying "thank you" to him at this time.