Groups come and groups go. So to do members. Any one who willingly accepts that invitation left in a guestbook or their inbox will inevitably find some groups where they are a poor match or a group that is poorly run. Also no two members experience a group the exact same way. What may be an excellent group for those who invite you, may be all wrong for you. This may be true even when the leader and membership are intelligent and eloquent.
If your experience with and opinion of these groups was/is different from my own, that is to be expected. You can tell your story. I will tell mine. I do not have all the facts because I lost touch with two out of the three groups after I left them. As for the groups themselves, as far as I know none of them are in business any more, and with the exception of Friends United, I am quite unsure why though I have suspicions.
Until recently, all three of these groups had pressies in the gallery. I left them up because they were of historical importance. When I revised the pressie galleries, I took down the pressies for these groups but felt very uncomfortable erasing this part of my online history. Therefore, I give you my stories of the three defunct groups:
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Friends United
I joined Friends United in the summer of 2000. It was a small group with nine members. I busied myself signing the guestbooks. There may have been some sort of mailing list. It was never that active. I liked Amy, the leader. I think we communicated via ICQ several times. In the winter of 2000/2001, Amy closed the group. She wanted to write a book on postpartum depression and she felt her partner was not doing enough work. I was left with the pressies and an empty feeling.
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Life's Survivors
I joined Life's Survivors around the time I joined Friends United. Life's Survivors was for any one who had survived any sort of tragedy. I got admitted because I had lost two cats. Other members were in the group due to bad marriages or childhood sexual abuse.
Life's Survivors had an unmoderated email discussion list called lschat@yahoogroups.com The group was supposed to be a support group, but we never decided what a support group should do. Really good support is a messy business because it deals with sticky and controversial issues.
In late fall of 2000 a member made the "mistake" of forwarding a glurge tale to the list called the Wooden Bowl. In the story, a little boy makes a wooden bowl for his father to eat out of when he gets old because that is what he gives his own feeble father who can not seem to keep from breaking dishes. Instead of simply praising the story, another member of the list (not me by the way) said that this story illustrates the cycle of abuse. Then she wondered how the grandfather had treated the father when he was a boy. A spirited discussion became a full fledged flame war.
Then the list went silent. There was another flame war some time later. I believe this second flame war was over how a member should treat a dead beat sister who was overstaying her welcome as a houseguest. Once again the list went silent. This time I decided to instigate. Since I was not in pressing need of support, I wrote about assorted computer related issues. Then I had this great idea of a topic. I wanted to start parallel threads on Life's Survivors and another list, Netdynamics about what happens when kindness goes awry, a "pearls before swine" thread if you will.
Lschat once again exploded. This time I was the scapegoat. Survivors threatened to kill themselves. If a topic they detested on a mailing list could push these fragile ladies over the edge, what were they doing on any email discussion list and wouldn't something in real life have killed them anyway? How do you say hyperbole and manipulation? If it hadn't been all aimed at me, it would have been funny.
The list ended up with a weird set of rules and I ended up with my posts on review. I guess you can say at this point I had enough. I set the list digest and checked it periodically. Then I checked it less and less. One day in July 2001, I found a post in the digest about a mother who was a survivor feeling the need to beat her six year old daughter with a stick. I decided it was time for Life's Survivors and me to part company. I quit the lists and took the banner off my web site but left the pressies in place.
I don't know what happened to cause the demise of Life's Survivors because I was not around to see it, but if you type in http://www.lifesurvivors.com you get a page full of ads. Shannon, the owner and founder, let the domain lapse. That is all I know.
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The Group of Many Names
In the time before I joined it, this group was called Touched by an Angel. While I was there, it's name was changed to Secret Garden and around the time I left, it was called Rainbow of Hope. It seems to be down currently. This is what you get when you click on the URL.
The rest of this story is censored.
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