Sonia/Marcia

Hi Marcia – I’m glad to hear you’re finding clarity!

I’m going to address your post, even though you have strongly suggested that you’re not interested in reading feedback. I’d like to address it for the benefit of people who aren’t familiar with this forum or the moderation here. (As for the regular community members, I think they’re very confident of the way things work here and they can skip this whole thing. :) )

I did take another look at the threads you posted and I do not see any attacks, slander, or other out-of-line comments made towards you. Some of our community members may be blunt, short, or use some phrases that may make you feel like you have sunburn, but everyone has the intent to try to share advice to help you gain clarity based on their own life experiences. I don’t think people want to be abrasive on purpose – instead, they’re trying to shine a very, very bright light through the fog of confusion that people experience with their relationships.

If you have a *specific* example that you think is out-of-line with the spirit of this forum, we can discuss it here in this thread.

That said, for the benefit of other visitors who are unfamiliar with this forum and may be concerned about this kind of interaction, I’ll elaborate:

This forum is over a decade old and has had thousands of topics posted (33k topics and 300k replies as of 2019, before I had to purge some old topics). I think it’s safe to say that thousands of people have asked questions here. Unfortunately, some of those thousands of people will wander in here and post things that are not in good faith. That sucks and it makes me feel bad; hence, we have a bit of moderation, just to make sure topic threads don’t go down a bad path.

If I see a thread where a person appears to be misleading the community on purpose (a show of bad faith), then I step in and point it out. I also TRY to turn things towards a positive direction, because (a) I could be wrong and I don’t want to blow-up someone over a mistake on my part, and (b) even if a person seems to be posting in bad faith, they could still be in need of help and would benefit from having genuine interactions with the community. I’m not trying to “flex on them” or try to hurt people; I just want the community to feel like their time here is well-spent.

I stepped-in with the intent of putting a polite spin on a situation where you lied to our community. You pretended to be someone different, and you weren’t. I kinda get where you’re coming from but that’s not how we do things here.

I’m sorry you didn’t like that, but I take a firm stance against doing that kind of thing — these are real human beings in our community, and they’re spending actual time and emotional energy on addressing you. It’s not fair to play games by posting different stories and masquerading as different people. And, of course, you’re a real human being too, someone who really wants to understand their situation — so I genuinely try to be kind when addressing you.

I know your situation is distressing you and I don’t want to cause you discomfort by moderating your post, but I’m not backing down from my position on that subject.

I do take feedback to heart and try to learn from this community, and try to find the right balance for moderation. That said: Your post above paints a bleak picture of your interactions with our community. I’m sorry, I just don’t agree with much of anything you wrote there. Honestly, I don’t think you feel that way, either.

I’m open to discussing specific things that were said to you with the intent of “hurting” instead of “helping”.

Again, I’m glad that you found clarity elsewhere. I’m sorry you didn’t feel like your time spent here was worthwhile, and I’m sorry you felt compelled to address the community this way.