I think it’s time I talked a little bit about Fertility Friend. I am no longer a member there. I am continuing to chart using their free software but I most certainly will not be handing them any more money to stay in their little “community”.

Things have been getting progressively worse over there in terms of censorship. I never had a problem with them until recently when they started deleting PMs that people were sending to each other and warning people. And then banning people. Why? Because people were trading email addresses. Yes, this is the big transgression that is causing them to BAN people from their forum – giving out your email address.

Not only are they disallowing any form of information sharing (I was warned for giving someone my MSN handle to chat with them), but any mention of a banned person – even letting other friends know that they are banned – is immediately deleted and the person “warned” or banned. Also any mention of these new “rules” and any (and I mean any) hint of disatisfaction with these rules results in the immediate deletion of the thread/PM and the person being told to not mention it again or leave and not come back.

The rules have been changed as we go. In December I traded home addresses with some friends of mine there in order to do a card exchange and there was not a word about it from the moderators. That is obviously not a case anymore. They are monitoring private messages and are catching pretty much any message that has anything remotely similar to something in their “banned words” list (words like “contact me” “email” “hotmail” “message”, as well as all the names of people who are banned. One message was deleted because it referenced a banned person’s cat. I mean seriously, wtf?). I personally know over 10 people who have been banned for trying to contact friends and let them know why they’ve disappeared. FF does NOT want anyone to keep in contact outside of their site which is completely rediculous.

The worst part is that because of the strict bans they have and all the deleting and banning a bunch of people have no idea what’s going on. They notice friends are missing, but they have no clue why, no clue what’s going on behind the scenes, and no way to find out either. No way to get in contact with friends that they have known potentially for months, even a year or two. Your friend just up and disappears and no one is allowed to mention a damn thing. I hope the word gets out, I hope friends can find each other again.

Their rules are basically “sit down, shut up, follow the rules, don’t talk to each other except within our defined channels, don’t mention anything in our disallowed topics list, and never complain about it.” What the hell kind of dictatorship have they become?

So there are a whole bunch of us who have moved to a new site to try to keep in touch with the people they’ve made friends with (www.loungeplace.com, a site that doesn’t try to control who you are friends with and how you maintain that friendship). I am absolutely not sticking around a forum that censors so heavily and tries to maintain a steel grip on their members. That’s not how I work. And I’m very disappointed in the administrators there for allowing this to happen. Whatever they think they are doing they need to take a hard look at themselves.