As many of you know by now, famous and myself have become involved, and I spent the last week giving her a guided tour of London. This was announced in LiveJournal, but not on the forum. Perhaps this is just a coincidence of timing, but I suspect that that announcement was at least part of the catalyst that started this thread.

Neither of us has logged much Internet time over the last week, so this is the first time I've seen this thread, and I've been forced to consider this carefully. Of course, I can only speak for myself here; famous might have her own input when she gets back home.

Should the announcement have been made here, instead of on LJ? I don't think so. There's certainly a case for cross-posting to both, but as it is principly a personal matter, I still think that LJ is the more appropriate medium. There are (of course) problems with this, which I'll try and address:

LJ reduces things to "broadcasting of form letters": Had we posted to the forum, I think we'd have posted exactly the same "form letter". The only way I can think of to have avoided that would have been a hundred individually crafted memos, plus something elsewhere for our non-Rinkie and ex-Rinkie friends. I don't see that as being workable at all.

Not everyone reads LJs: No, they don't. Not everyone reads the forum, either. And there are many non-Rinkies who have never heard of RinkForum that I want to tell about this. We did memo those people that we wanted to know but who didn't read LJ so they would see it. It helped that we KNOW who reads our LJs and who doesn't. I have no idea who never reads the forum, who checks it once a month, who skims the topics for stuff that looks interesting and who reads every single post. By posting on LJ we knew that pretty much everyone we wanted to know would know.

The formation of a new relationship between Rinkies is de facto Forum business: This is probably true, and is the best case I can think of for having posted here. Having said that, I don't see why this should have been the *first* place we posted.

It certainly wasn't our intention to restrict who would see that announcement, and I can only apologise to anyone who felt slighted by our choice of medium. I hope that you can understand why we made that choice, though I hadn't really thought about it myself until I read through this thread, and I don't think that famous had, either. It just seemed to be a natural decision.

I have made a great many friends here, and I'm glad to have the oportunity to have met so many of them (27, currently) in person. In retrospect, it may have been better to have cross-posted to the Forum, especially if people were upset by that.

I did post this following section to LJ a little while ago, but I felt I needed to read through this thread before I responded to it, whereas in LJ, I can just post anything I want to, without worrying about how interesting it is. Notheless, I don't think that makes this version any less important:

I love famous, and I hope that we can make this work.

winter"I really hope we didn't upset anyone"mute