This topic has had a number of original posts removed due to the inclusion of personal details. Some of the posts that were removed by Howard last night as he was trying to moderate the topic on the fly have been put back. I wouldn’t like to say it makes good reading but here it is, warts and all (or most of them).
I must say that I’m appalled by the way some of you “speak” to each other on this forum and I’m very disappointed in the treatment of rookie moderator Howard, who was supporting me by trying to stop things from getting out of hand.
I was planning to make an announcement about our two new Moderators, Howard and Lisa, who have recently volunteered to help me look after the forum now that it is much busier. I should have done it sooner but I didn’t realise that Howard would get called into action quite so quickly! My apologies go to him for that and an announcement will follow soon.
To answer some of the issues in this thread about the on-line petition, as I have said before, I set up the NO on-line Petition and I also monitor it for duplicate signatures. I do this using software to allow me to filter for duplicate names and duplicate email addresses. I’ve removed a significant number of duplicates, most of which I’m pretty sure were due to people being uncertain if their first post had been accepted. The process did not pick up the 3 signatures highlighted in this thread because they were all different names and different emails. Two of these have now been removed, as will any others that come to my attention as duplicates.
The issues that some of you have described, about being uncertain if people have signed a petition more than once, apply to all petitions (on-line or paper) and not just the NO Petition. The YES Petition, although it is much smaller, is suffering from similar problems and several of the 54 signatures on that are from the same people.
In the end, all that anyone can do is their best to ensure that people only sign once. I am doing that for the on-line NO Petition and would estimate from the info I am able to view and download from the site that it is no more that a couple of % off being unique signatures.
If you would like to continue this thread and not have it closed down and removed again please stay polite and well mannered when you are posting to it and responding to others.