26

After taking last week off from this blog, I'll review the most active threads of the 10 day period that I missed. None of these threads will likely be surprises to anyone who has paid even the least amount of attention to the news. The most active thread, by a considerable measure, was titled, "Tourist submersible missing on visit to Titanic" and posted in the "Off-Topic" forum. This thread followed the initial disappearance, subsequent search for, and eventual discovery of the fate of the OceanGate submersible that was lost during a visit to the wreck of the Titanic. Rather than detail the substance of this now 147 page thread, I am going to take the opportunity to be somewhat self-indulgent. I sometimes enjoy providing a behind-the-scenes look at how things work on this website. We are a two-person operation and are essentially responsible for the website 24/7, including when we are otherwise on vacation. As I announced earlier, this past week we were hosting out-of-town guests and celebrating our younger son's high school graduation. As such, I was hoping to minimize my interaction with DCUM. This thread massively interfered with that plan. Almost immediately, many posters decided that the loss of five lives was an excellent opportunity for jokes and humor. Other posters considered this disrespectful and objected to it. My inbox was soon filled with reports of inappropriate posts. When I apparently didn't respond quickly enough, a poster continued reporting posts, but then also started replying to the posts and simply adding the word "reported". Those posts provoked responses arguing about the reports and reports complaining about the messages saying "reported". So, what might have been a single report morphed into five or more posts or reports, multiplied several times. I was forced to take a break from touring the Udvar-Hazy Center annex to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in order to sit with my phone trying to stem the tidal wave that was flooding my inbox. I blocked the IP address of the poster who continually replied "reported". But, when the block expired, she spent several days posting complaints about the block and creating even more posts for me to remove. There was considerable disagreement in this thread about the applicability of DCUM's "48 hour rule" which prohibits negative posts about deceased individuals for the first 48 hours after their death. In the beginning, this rule was thought by some not to apply because no deaths had been confirmed. Once parts of the destroyed vessel were discovered, some posters argued that 48 hours had already passed since the deaths. My concern was less about splitting hairs but more focused on keeping the thread substantive and on-topic. I didn't see much need for absurd discussion of orcas, unfunny attempts at humor (which in many cases was simply copied without attribution from Twitter), or lame poetry. Ironically, with the thread reaching nearly 2,200 posts, as recently as yesterday a poster was still complaining about posts being removed. I think plenty has been posted and nothing of importance was likely missed.