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Greetings friend Donut, and many thanks for making us aware of your brothers presense.
Brother of our famous fluffy confection, I am sorry I am so obviously late with this greetings proclomation. One of the great things about the majority of people here at IW is that they really do love to make new friends, but we/they can't do that if we are not introduced. None of us would expect or want you to feel that you are in competition with the 'CricketMeister'. You are not living in Donut's shadow, everyone here wants to get to know YOU, we already have, and need I STRESS, the "ONLY" Donut! We have a tremendous variety of good people here, many joined the boards and immediately became proliferous posters. Many only post once in a while. I'm among the "Old group" here and I don't post that much and am not known by a large group of people. We have had many tales of people who would post and say, "I have been 'lurking' for a long time and just now decided to post.", and many of them are regular posters now. Don't feel uncomfortable about having been a 'lurker' for a while, many of us were and continue to be 'lurkers' the majority of the time, only posting when we feel we have something relevant to contribute.
As far as controversial issues goes, we all have to decide whether or not to engage in the debates. I myself generally steer clear of them. I have only been involved in one controversial thread that I can recall and it was regarding "Gun control", here in the US. One of our old members "Draconia" from the old board, who hasn't been around for a while was being read the 'riot act' from almost everyone because she had a pistol in the home and small children. People were rightfully concerned about the issues, and didn't care that she lived in the country with no local support, or that her husband was a railroad engineer who was out of town Monday thru Friday. All they cared about were the 'guns' and that they were bad. I couldn't sit there and witness this without getting involved. I didn't insult anyone, or go through my lists of pro's and cons. We often get so caught up in the purely subjective point of view that we lose touch with real world circumstances.
So I posted this; "Regardless of what each and every one of our opinions regarding gun control is, I certainly hope that we would all agree that we would much rather come home and find a would be rapist/ murderer shot dead on our living room floor, than to come home and find our spouse and children brutally raped and murdered because they had no way to protect themselves".
Putting a real life angle on it gave people something to think about and the controversy died then and there.
As I said, that is the only controversial thread I can recall engaging in. You don't have to feel pressured to post to threads that you think might get your dander up too much. If you do feel like posting to one, do so in a respectful, considerate manner and everything should be just fine.
It would be nice to meet you, and will be a pleasure when you decide that you are comfortable enough to introduce yourself to us by saying "Hello", or by responding to someone elses thread.
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