Once again, in the last couple of weeks we went through a few heated arguments on the Hudson Leick Mailing List, forcing me to moderate the whole list temporarily and three people for the long term. As usually with most arguments it's all he said she said and people blowing things out of common sense proportion. Today I want to write about it, mostly to get down my impressions while they're still somewhat fresh. I'm not going to go too much into detail on exactly what was said as I don't have the space. But when I look this up in the archives at some future date, it all started on June 26, 2001.

It was an a rather baffling email that I received that morning. A broadcast message from the Hudson Leick Official Fan Club -- not it itself all that unusual since they do send out a message every couple of months -- saying that there was no longer an official fan club, the PO Box for sending things to Ms Leick was cancelled, and that a couple of Fan Club people had resigned. It was signed "On Behalf of the Hudson Leick Fan Club" and the whole email didn't have the tone of Mike Ownby, who had been doing the broadcast emails for the last year or two.

Wow, I thought as I skimmed my email before leaving for work, that's sad. And in the back of my mind I thought that this will cause a stir on the HLML. Now let me tell you right off that the HLML is not an official mailing list and has no affiliation with the Fan Club. The HLOFC has two thousand people and the broadcasts reach all of them. The HLML has about 200 people and is the largest forum for people to talk about Ms Leick (there used to be an HLOFC web board but it quickly degraded to flames and rather prurient remarks, much like the alt.fan.hudsonleick newsgroup). So the HLML would be the natural place to discuss these latest developments.

Let's go back a bit farther. I, having switched to Mac OS X and not having quite figured out how multiple network interfaces were supposed to be set up, didn't have my Ricochet account at work. So while I'm at work I wasn't getting personal email which therefore meant that the HLML was out of sight out of mind during work hours. And since the HLML at the best of times can only charitably be called a "low-volume list", I had become lax during the months since Mac OS X and wasn't checking the HLML via the web site.

That mistake was costly, as I found out when I came home that night, late and tired as I usually am. The last thing I wanted to deal with was an impending flame war, and yet that's what I had to do. Matt Peters, ever helpful, had forwarded the HLOFC broadcast message to the HLML. I don't mind since the memberships only mostly overlap and as a list admin I would be uncomfortable forwarding someone else's email to my list. Mike Ownby had replied, in essence saying that Debbie (original founder and official fan club liaison to Ms Leick) had gotten into a spat with Ms Leick and had quit in a huff, sending out that weird email to the fan club members. Mike was a bit upset at this unexpected turn of events and cast some negative aspersions on Debbie (though without getting too bad, it should be fair to Debbie that she did not send out that message, but Mike and most of the other people didn't know that and he had assumed, an intelligent assumption that I probably would have made too but wrong nonetheless).

That resulted in a heated reply from Matt. Let me comment on Matt a bit. Old timer that he is with a history of positive contribution to the HLML (almost all before I joined the HLML), I pretty much lost whatever respect I had for him when he revealed that for months he had been on the list under an assumed name starting arguments and being quite the firebrand. That's pretty low in my book. It's one thing to use a handle right off the bat and stick with it, letting it become your persona. It's another thing to create a handle just so you can let off steam without other people getting mad at your real persona.

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