ANST - Mea Culpa!!!!! Kidney Hoax

[Paul Mitchell]

Galen here...    

----------
>From: Sara Bairrington <katri4684 at surfree.com>
>To: sca-caid at rogues.net.ironrose@webmaster.com, ansteorra at Ansteorra.ORG
>Subject: ANST - Mea Culpa!!!!!  Kidney Hoax
>Date: Thu, Jul 22, 1999, 1:29 AM
>

>I profoundly apologize to all on these lists for my fear for my friends.  I
>was taken in, but please believe my intent was not to spam, but to inform.
>So I'm gullible???  I'm truly sorry.  Ulrike

Not to pick on Baroness Ulrike, but this is one of my
hot buttons.  I administer the Elfsea list, and it's
against the rules post this sort of fear-mongering
there.

One of the unfortunate results of the e-mail revolution
has been the widespread dissemination of these false
fear-mongering stories.  I believe that to frighten
someone is to gain power over them (a debateable
issue, I know), and so I very much resent having such
things land in my mailbox.

The easiest way to identify them is when they end with
a charge to forward the message to everyone you know.

Other identifiers include a complete lack of dates,
names, authors, credentials, or other verifiable
information.  Just vague references to some 
unspecified press conference, or a posting on the
Microsoft or IBM website, or, as in this case, a
newspaper.

Another aspect of this phenomenon is the genre of
message meant to make you "feel good", which then
challenges you to forward it to all your friends,
or all the people who love you, or whatever.

These are bad enough when someone sends you one of these
personally, but when they get posted to our most-used
forums, it chokes out the real information exchange
that makes the internet -- and our mailing lists --
valuable.  (And in each case, the person forwarding
to the kingdom list rarely forwards the warnings
anywhere else.  Do they forward them to family
and personal friends?  Co-workers in their company?
Do they print out copies and _mail_ them to folks
they know without e-mail?  Are they really sending
to _everyone_ they know?  I don't think so.)

So please don't post these "send to everyone you know"
messages to the lists.  That's why people get fed
up every so often and bail out complaining about
too many messages with too little substance.

- Galen of Bristol

_____________________________________________________
John 6:54-56
============================================================================
Go to http://lists.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.