I^2 members - Please, no rants or insulting posts here. This thread's purpose is only to attempt to find out what Gareth thinks has happened. If you have nothing meaningful to contribute, then I'd appreciate if you didn't post at all.
Rant of the day:
So AFF is gone thanks to an asshole misleading everyone and causing them to attack me and Amy as if we're the scum of the earth.
Apparently i'm a "sadistic little twerp" according to one old regular - why did they say this? Because I closed a forum, offered to forward email addresses legally (i.e without breaking the data protection act) and generally was too nice.
Someone stated that the current message on the site ("Please note - the forum is closed and will NOT going back up, it is not for sale to anyone and nobody is taking over") means that I hold the old userbase in contempt.
A new forum has been setup by a bunch of regulars, which in itself is fine - except for the horrendous amount of posts there calling for "justice" against me and Amy and the convincing of people who were previously behaving decently that we're both abusive and evil. One such post even talks about contacting the same person who stalked us both for years and caused absolute hell.
If I had even considered bringing AFF back up again, the backstabbing has guaranteed I won't. The sad thing is, it originally was only going to be down temporarily and the backstabbers have ruined that.
I honestly feel sick at having lost something i've spent just under a decade building.
I read this post on FOF.
I'd like to know who this malicious member you speak of is. Because from what I saw, no one on AFF attacked you or thought you were anything close to "the scum of the earth" until you made the decision to take away a valuable resource from them.
As for the message displayed on AFF, what did you expect? In my opinion, it is very selfish to close the forum off permanently. If you didn't want to continue running it, fair enough, but when someone like skyblue1 who, considering the circumstances, deserves more than a little respect from the both of you, offers to buy the forum from you, we have to question what motivated you refuse his offer. :-/
Gareth, you seem to have forgotten completely that we are Aspies, and many of us depend greatly on consistency. Some people also rely on these forums as their only opportunity to have friendships. So, for you to take that all away without any warning whatsoever is enough to warrant more than a little anger. I'm confused as to why you feel betrayed by us, when you are the ones who took something so important away from us.
As for the stalker thing, I have a feeling you're talking about the Spectrum Fairness blog? If that is the case, then I apologise for suggesting it.
I'd like it if you could offer a little insight into your version of the events. Or don't. It doesn't matter all that much now anyway. Just thought you might want to have a civil discussion about it.