I know some will think this took too long for me to post. Let me first say, I wanted to avoid any knee jerk reactions or anything to cause further disharmony to this community. I made the decision to take a day or two to think through what I wanted to say to the community regarding the recent ‘insanity’. As some have tried to point out, my silence is a show of approval. That is far from the truth.
I want to apologize for the reactionary posts made the other night and to all parties concerned. It was an uncalled for, ‘a heat of the moment’ reaction that should have never happened.
The resulting disruption to this board and its community members was unnecessary - for that, again, I want to apologize to this community.
Another reason in delaying my post was that I wanted to be as objective as possible to the reaction of the community. I tried to step back a read the resulting emails, instant messages and posts from every possible angle.
There are two points that I believe I must comment on in regard to those reactions.
The first point is we (Gary and Lee) need to heed the rules that we set for the entire group. You are absolutely right. It has always been my goal to keep GWW a place for professionals to work together and learn from one another and at the same time, have fun and share life’s nonsense while we work honestly with one another.
From this moment forward, I want to ‘reset’ the tone to just that. Many of us came together here because of that original idea. While that means working together, it also means being honest enough to TALK to other members if an issue or problem arises. And we all need to remember that we are all human and prone to bad days while we aim for good days. If it’s ok with everyone, I would like to start over in that original spirit.
My second point is something that most online communities do not see, and its members rarely take into consideration - It is what goes on behind the scenes. That unknown factor leads to many different places in our minds. And in this frame of thought - none of us know all the fact, even though we think we do. No one is privy to all of the information. This leads us all to speculation, which runs rampant. Thus leaving us only with perceptions. Unfortunately, in our online existence, it is these perceptions that some how morph into facts. We ALL need to take a step back and separate actual facts from perceived fictions - we need to do this not for the sake of the community, at large, but for our individual sanity.
I do want to close, with what may be considered reactive comments instead of proactive. I am sure that each of you will find your own truth in what I put before you or your own perception. If you decide that GWW is not where you’d like to be, then there are other options available to you.
No matter what you walk away with, know that we truly want to move forward from all of this, strengthen the bonds that many of us have made in here over the years and get back to business the way we used to.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post. If you have any questions, or comments you can reach me at gary@gaywidewebmasters.com.
Sincerely,
Gary-Alan
