Welcome to the unofficial Castle Village Forum. I created this forum as a means of sharing information, ideas, and concerns about the Castle Village community. Although the CV Newsletter is a nice publication and I applaud the good folks who produce it, there is a need for a forum that gets inmformation out in a more timely fashion.

Some of you will be familiar with the format of this forum from the Hudson Cliffs Forum. There is an e-mail alert feature that allows you fto get information from this forum as soon as it is posted. That is the easiest way to stay informed, but it can sometimes clutter up your e-mail with unwanted information. The alternative is to bookmark the forum and visit daily for updates and new posts.

A few words about etiquette. It's easy in an impersonal online forum to say things that we would not normally say if we were speaking directly to a person, and it is also easy to misinterpret someone's remarks and respond with unkind words to a perceived unkind word, setting off a "flame-war." In person-to-person conversations, a wink or a nod or a smile can change the meaning of a statement in ways that are impossible to duplicate in a written forum context. Even those "smiley's" at the end of a sentence :>) just don't carry the same meaning or weight as a real smile.

Ironic statements and sarcasm are bound to be misinterpreted, and should generally be avoided. At the same time, if you feel someone has been unjustly cruel you might want to contact the person directly by e-mail to voice your concerns before attacking the individual publicly on the forum - afterall, you may have simply misunderstod the person's remarks.

Finally, I know that there are strong differences of opinion on fundamental issues involving politics, religion, morality, child-rearing, and even mundane day-to-day issues. I urge everyone to respect the rights of others to disagree and argue only the issues, avoiding at all times personal attacks

-- Michael Gatton (mgatton@adiglobal.com), June 29, 2002