And then it got very quiet and peaceful, downright civilized.

So. . .  we're not famous enough to have to institute an email blacklist yet. Not that we ever set out to be famous, but we did discover a while back that getting enough business involves getting noticed enough statistically to secure sales. Any shyness we had needed to go away or at least be dealt with. One of our outreach tools was Youtube ( more on that in just a minute ).

The update on my angry little troll is that he made another squeeky angry sound at me so I reported him to his ISP and to his domain registry for "cyber-harassment" and I may have taken some further steps to try to make sure that anyone else he's harassing can figure out who he is, where he lives, and how to reach him by telephone should they need to file a police report. Yep, a police report. Harassing isn't legal, it pretty much falls under "stalker" laws. In this particular case we're talking about a guy who setup a domain name and email for the sole purpose of hurting people, and like I said in a previous post, he's been at it for years.

Update: However, even in trying to do good, sometimes mistakes get made. Not every bit of information can be verified, and sometimes despite all best intentions, things go wrong. I'll still try to do the right thing if I see or experience bullying, but the fact is, if somebody is determined to do wrong and then hide under a rock-- it may not always be that easy to find which slimy little rock they're hiding under.

Youtube just instituted a new policy: they're asking people to use their real names. They aren't requiring it yet, but I think they should. This quote pretty much says it all, "95 percent of comments still contain either a racial slur, a sexist tirade, is totally incomprehensible, or some combination of those,"--Leslie Horn of Gizmodo. Because basically, if you create and foster "troll heaven", you're responsible for the outcome, and the outcome in this case is disgusting and harmful.

Anybody seen the Saturday Night Live take on this?