As you point out, the Guestbook doesn’t facilitate threaded discussions. That’s no accident. The original bulletin board was designed for such discussions, but they quickly got out of hand, with people pouring in wild theories, tortured misinterpretations, misquotations, and attributions to me of things I never said, and generally turning the whole thing ugly and downright harmful to the participants’ mental health, so that I routinely felt compelled to step in to set everyone straight and stop the bloodshed.

After about three months of this I told my Webmaster: “Get rid of that thing!” He got rid of it and replaced it with the Guestbook you see there now.

A reader found this site, http://www.reddit.com/r/leavers, which is intended for threaded discussion of my works and ideas. There’s not much there at this writing (February, 2013), but with a little publicity and sharing, that could change. I signed up myself and have contributed a comment.

NOTE: The Guestbook was eliminated in this new incarnation of Ishmael.org (2019). Facebook and other online outlets are more conducive to interaction.   

ID: 765
posted:
updated: 26 Feb 2013