View source for A History of BoyChat by Alexis (Jongen's Warning)

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<font size="+2" color="black">'''Jongen's Warning'''</font>
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First of all, welcome to BoyChat. Whether you are a boy lover looking for peer support, or you are simply not sure of what to call yourself but want to gain a better understanding of your feelings, I hope you will find this a helpful resource. If you are not a boy lover, if you don't know what it is that makes us who we are, then take some time and read through these messages. You may be surprised. And if you are a law enforcement official looking to make an arrest, then you are going to be disappointed.

Because what you are about to read are the thoughts, feelings and everyday experiences of a group of people who, through no fault of their own, have been sentenced to a life of painful loneliness, fear, and depression; people whose purpose in life is to heal, not to hurt; people who want to offer friendship and love and guidance and support and to make a boy's life a little brighter. Unfortunately, we live in a society that still has not managed to gain any understanding of these feelings, their simple sincerity, and how deeply rooted they are in one's soul and in one's life. BoyChat allows us to safely share our thoughts and feelings, to discuss relevant issues in our individual lives and in the larger world, to support, accept, and understand.

However, in the interest of protecting myself as well as the future of this forum, I do have to lay down some guidelines with respect to what should be considered appropriate here. In an ideal world, this would not be necessary -- these are nothing more than words on a screen, after all. However, the real world doesn't work that way. Everything we do has consequences, and if we do not consider those consequences ahead of time, we have only ourselves to blame.

The format of this forum makes it very easy for anyone to participate, while at the same time protecting people's anonymity. However, this does not hold true for me. I would be in a very dangerous position if anything of questionable legality were to appear here. Before you post, think very carefully about what you are about to say, and about the consequences it may have.

We must remember that BoyChat was intended primarily to be a support forum. I don't want to discourage anyone from participating, but it is absolutely imperative that you exercise caution in what you say and how you express yourself here. If you feel that you must post sexually explicit material, either in the form of stories or pictures, or information on where to find such material, or if you feel you need to be overly explicit about something not exactly within the law, then I have to ask you to post it elsewhere. Aside from the fact that this is not the most appropriate place, I must put my own safety above all else. If it means removing a post that I feel puts me in danger, then I will do it, without a moment's hesitation. It is a value judgment, it's true. And if you're going to call me a censor because of it, go ahead. I would rather have that than be investigated or charged over the actions of a careless individual. If you were in my position, you would probably do the same (unless you like taking foolish risks).

A few people have expressed disappointment in the fact that they are limited in what they can say here. My response is that, in my opinion, if they are honestly bothered by these restrictions, then they have lost sight of what BoyChat was intended to be. We do not live in a perfect world, and we must deal with that, whether we agree with the restrictions imposed on us or not. All things considered, it still comes down to the basic question of whether I want to make myself an easy target for law enforcement, just for the sake of maintaining 100% free speech on BoyChat. No, I do not. I really cannot justify it. It's really as simple as that, and it's not something about which I feel I have much of a choice.

The bottom line is that we can continue to have a truly supportive forum that we can all feel safe to participate in, if we all practice a little restraint. Or, if this is something that most people don't feel they can agree to, then we will soon have no BoyChat at all. I reiterate that this is not a case of what I think is OK or not OK. It is entirely a case of keeping myself out of trouble. I think the choice is easy.

There is one other request I would like to make, and this is for a purely technical reason. The message traffic has increased far beyond anything I had expected, and unfortunately this is starting to cause problems with the message board script, which is very inefficient and was not designed to handle anything of this magnitude. I think the solution is to try and cut down on the number of posts that say little more than "Me too" or "I agree" or that don't really have much to do with the topic. Similarly, private conversations between people are better left to e-mail. Even a very short "me too" message takes up a lot of disk space and increases the size of the message index file by a few lines, and pretty soon we have a 300k monster index file that takes forever to load. As well, we end up with all kind of strange "permission denied" errors and posts being inserted into the wrong threads, all of which take time to fix.

If you've read this far, you deserve congratulations. :-) If you have any questions or concerns, please write to me.
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