Hello Is anyone willing to be interviewed?

[1Timothy115]

17 hours ago, Salyan said:

I didn't say secretly, I said somewhere else. The IFB forums might be a good place.

It is not great for a legitimate new member to come back to her introduction post and find it filled with people wondering whether she is a fake. 
 

I apologize for the "secretly" but somewhere else might also exclude some members. The only time I can remember not questioning motives and intent is when a new member provided it in advance in their introduction. Is this a new policy to not question new members?

[Salyan]

Wow. Never thought this was such a can of worms.

I'm just asking people to be nice. How would you like it if you came to a site like this and was greeted with this level of suspicion? We have, as others have said, questioned motives before, but really - do we need to be doing that? We don't have to trust everyone implicitly, but why greet them with 'Hi! We're Baptists, and we don't trust you. Tell us your whole life story before we agree to treat you like a human being.'.  Seriously.

As a moderator, I'm invested in making people feel welcome on this site. This thread just seemed worse than most for being suspicious and unwelcoming, so I said something.

[...]

4 hours ago, Salyan said:

As a moderator, I'm invested in making people feel welcome on this site. This thread just seemed worse than most for being suspicious and unwelcoming, so I said something.

Jim Alaska made a fair suggestion.  Why not move it to another thread

4 hours ago, Salyan said:

but why greet them with 'Hi! We're Baptists, and we don't trust you. Tell us your whole life story before we agree to treat you like a human being.'

A bit melodramatic, don't you think?  We neither asked for a life story nor did we treat her as something less than human.  You might have the opinion that we questioned her unfairly, but painting us like you just did is pretty unfair to us.

Personally, I don't believe we were unfair.  A young girl asks for people to participate in something that would entail giving her our email personal addresses (suspicious sign #1).  She has pink hair and is dressed like an elephant in one photo and in the other photo, she is posing affectionately with another girl with blue hair (suspicious sign #2).  She claims she is writing a college paper that involves Baptists and that there are none to ask anywhere near her (suspicious sign #3).  When politely asked for more information, she does not reply (suspicious sign #4).  

There are a few scenarios that I can think of.  One is that she was genuine, felt intimidated by our questioning and has decided not to return.   Another is that she wanted to interview Baptists in order to twist their words in a mocking way to get a good grade in a college English class.  Yet another is that she was attempting to acquire personal email addresses for the purpose of spam or something similar.  Seeing that the third scenario happens constantly on the internet; especially in forums like this, I don't think anything was handled inappropriately.

Just my opinion.

Edited February 17, 2017 by Brother Stafford

[Salyan]

Pink hair, blue hair, or rainbow hair, she deserves to be treated with kindness and respect. I am asking that all members consider that in future when responding to new members.

Thank you.

[...]

28 minutes ago, Salyan said:

Pink hair, blue hair, or rainbow hair, she deserves to be treated with kindness and respect. I am asking that all members consider that in future when responding to new members.

Thank you.

So, you deliberately ignore the entire rest of my points and imply that the sole reason we suspected her was because she had colored hair.  What I was attempting to show is that there were several reasons that justified asking further questions.  We were neither unkind, nor disrespectful.  If you are asserting that we treated her unkind, disrespectfully or less than human, please provide quotes that show examples of this. 

I previously sent her the following message to which I received no reply:

"Hello, Ms. Charity.

If your request for someone to interview is genuine, please accept my apology for how we responded to your request.  We get a great deal of spam and new members with malicious intent, so we can be a bit suspicious at times.

If you are still interested in interviewing someone for your paper, I would be willing to do so, but I would prefer to do it via private messages here on OnlineBaptist.  let me know if I can help."

This is yet another reason that I suspected her further.  If someone comes into a forum and asks to be contacted for further contact through personal emails, then ignores people when they contact them, if they are legitimate, that makes no sense.  It is like waking into a restaurant, asking to be shown to a seat, asking for a menu, and then ignoring the wait staff when they attempt to take your order and then just sitting there silently.

We did not treat her unkindly or disrespectfully.  We were cautious and asked for more information before we gave out our personal information to a stranger. 

Edited February 17, 2017 by Brother Stafford

[Salyan]

6 hours ago, Brother Stafford said:

So, you deliberately ignore the entire rest of my points and imply that the sole reason we suspected her was because she had colored hair.  What I was attempting to show is that there were several reasons that justified asking further questions.  

 

I simply chose to respond to the point I had issue with, namely, that the color of one's hair should be cause for any suspicion whatsoever.  Naturally-colored hair, after all, is not a requirement for membership on OB.

I am very disappointed that a simple (and I would have thought, reasonable) request should raise such an argument. In my estimation, we were treating her unkindly, and, as a moderator, I am asking that our members be more considerate in their responses in the future.

Hope Charity, I'm locking this thread as I feel it's heading nowhere good. Feel free to introduce yourself in a new thread, if you so choose.