Now I’m remembering why I got off most pagan mailing lists.
I recently joined a list for pagan women who are sexual abuse survivors, because I’m dealing with a lot of the old stuff coming up right now (it’s cyclical). And at first, it was nice to be able to talk to women with similar values who are dealing with a lot of the same issues.
But several people on the list use that damned “stationery” crap for their emails, background and all. I hate HTML mail. Silly fonts and colors are bad enough—but enormous background graphics? UGH.
Someone new to the list mentioned that one person’s messages, in particular, are crashing her computer and that sometimes other people’s messages are also causing problems for her. I pointed out that it was due to this particular poster’s enormous background files, and that if everyone would refrain from using HTML in email, there wouldn’t be a problem. Alternatively, those of us who don’t want HTML mail could set up filters so that we don’t see messages from those people.
I’ve now been accused of nastily “attacking” the person with the extreme backgrounds, and oh, poor girl, she’s young and “in a bad place right now.”
I don’t care how old she is or what kind of “place” she’s in, I just pointed out a technical fact. She’s sending freakin’ huge messages that just contain a small paragraph of text, and opening her messages will crash some email clients (or freeze some Windows systems if they’re already low on resources).
And the flaky idiots are all running to the poster’s defense as if I’d done something horribly wrong. Wow, I’m being lumped in with her abuser!
That makes me wonder what the definition of “abuse” is for most of these people. Apparently, it’s a hell of a lot more inclusive of the most minor disagreements than mine is.
I cannot stand flakes. And there are too damned many of them in most pagan groups and on most pagan mailing lists.
