Apparently there are people that will dedicate their lives to an obsession with silencing a dissenting opinion. Over the years we've received a healthy share of death threats, email "bombs", and so on, so it's no surprise that some of these folks used the NHS board with the only purpose of sabotaging any earnest discussion.

For a year and a half, the board ran without a moderator. Most discussion boards can do very well without a moderator. However, these boards are ones where the members of the boards all wish the board to succeed. This was clearly not the case here. Why Niner fans would want to sabotage the place where they had a voice to rebut the words of the NHS remains a mystery, but in any event, posts become predominantly either garbage from this third category of fans or reactions of Niner-Haters to it. This garbage included personal attacks, deliberately off-topic nonsense, and the sheer irrationality of being unable to accept when a point of theirs had been disproven, as well as other disruptive tactics.

In March, 2001, a forum member volunteered of his own time to take over moderation duties of the board. He immediately declared everyone to have a clean slate and to be able to express whatever opinion they wished to as long as it was inside the board rules. For the rest of the life of the board, several Niner fans were still able to post as they wanted without ever having any problems with moderation. However, many were not. After some warnings, their continued behavior made it obvious that they never intended to change, so they were banned. Some chose to blame their opinions rather than their behavior for this, but this is simply disconnection from reality and the fact that they were violating the established rules, no matter what their opinions were.

Had we been dealing with rational people, the problem would have ended there. Certainly, the rational response would have simply been that if one was banned from a board by the management, to simply move on with one's life and find something new to do. As we soon discovered, we were not dealing with rational people. Once they were banned from the board, several individuals began to pursue what apparently became their life's goal: silencing the NHS and the board. Harrassment began to be directed at the forum users and the moderator (such is the thanks he gets for volunteering).

In a typical case, this temper tantrum would have gone on for a little while and then stopped. But the people involved kept it going in a campaign of cyberterrorism. Not to give these people any credit with such a technical word; after all, harrassment doesn't take ingenuity or intellect, just a lack of moral worth and apparently nothing better to do. They went to other boards frequented by NHS board users to harass them there. They sent harassing e-mails. They attempted to find and divulge personal information about posters for the purposes of intimidation. They established personal hate boards dedicated to libeling the NHS, the board management and its posters, often carrying the NHS name in an attempt to fool people into thinking they were the NHS, and created for themselves a fictional life of importance by plotting the various cyberterrorism activities against the NHS.

Had these boards been merely for discussion of similar issues, and carried their own distinct name, there would have been no problems, and in fact that would have been a mature and rational course of action. Unfortunately, that was not the case. These boards were quickly shut down for violating several rules of DelphiForums, but new ones would soon be opened in a desperately childish need to deny that anyone could stop them from their illegal behavior.

When these "problem children" stumbled upon a security vulnerability in DelphiForums and proceeded to step up their cyberterrorism campaign to include harassing e-mail to every member of the forum that they could find, behind a screen of anonymity, we stepped back and took another look at the forum and why it was there. We had offered a great opportunity to 49er fans to openly debate this web site and its creators. Instead, a group of cowards hiding behind monitors devoted over a year and a half of their lives to abusing that gift.

This is sad, but it also provided a reminder of how the truth of the NHS affects people. After all, no one tries to silence someone who is obviously mistaken in the first place. You don't see crusades against the Flat Earth Society. So the irony is that by acting in the manner they did, these problem children proved the NHS point in ways our words never could.

The decision was then reached to pull the plug on these children and shut down the board. Now the voice of the NHS is heard from the web page without any dissenting viewpoints available at a message board. So it's not the cause of the Niner-Hater that has lost out here. The real losers, going back to our three types of Niners fans, are the type 1 fans, the ones who were capable of valid and logical discussion. To these fans, we can say we honestly appreciated your viewpoints and participation. We apologize to you for your "fellow Niner fans" stealing your opportunity to make your voice heard.

In the future, we may resume having a message board if a setup can be found with enough security precautions to insure that only the rational will be allowed to participate without having to worry about harrassment. Or we may never have one again. Either way, the NHS will not allow itself to be used to give an audience to irrational cowards who violate both civil and criminal law again and again.