Forgot to tell you, I'm still having a problem with my forum page. When I try to reply to the 1 message that's been posted, it just keeps making a clicking noise and won't let me post. I emailed the person who posted asked dif she could reply to it, and she replied to herself and it went through. That's the only page that does it. The chick who posted is mad at me, anyway. Maybe she has blocked me somehow. LOL! She posted a link to her "Atheist View" website and bashed us for having a prayer at our last reunion. Check it out. Her name is "Dianna Trantham". Any suggestions on how to deal with her? I sent her a polite message, but now she says I'm ignoring her and all atheists.

Ummmmmmm. All right, first the technical stuff. I'm not having any problems clicking the Reply button in your forum, so my guess is you're having some strange type of caching issue or something else happening locally. Please try clearning your browser's cache and rebooting your computer. Let's hope that alone resolves the problem. If not, can you tell me if you can repeat this same problem using any other web browser on that same computer?

We can't advise on what should or shouldn't be posted on a class web site, but I can tell you one thing for sure: You own your web site. What content can, or can't be posted on your web site is solely at your discretion. You are also free to post policies regarding what type of content is and isn't acceptable. Somebody else here who's faced similar situations may wish to chime in and explained how they dealt with it and what kind of success they had.

The clicking sounds like a pop up problem. Does a box show up above the site stating that pop ups not allowed after you click on it? I finally had to allow pop ups on my site to stop the clicking.

I have been one of those cases that censored a post. We have a classmate that gets out of control sometimes and I thought his post would be taken the wrong way and touched on a subject we tried to avoid. It was the Kent State shootings. (we live near Kent State) I deleted his post and sent him a note expaining why. He blew up!! He pulled his profile information and changed all his last postings on the forum to CENSORED. Then he started attacking me saying that I was a censor nazi. I entered a post that we will try to move on from this and I was discussing it with that person. It took some time for both of us to heal from that one. Even I was ready to chuck the whole thing. We lost a few people along the way because of it. Which was part of why we don't talk about those things. Some things you just need to keep in private conversations. We have all now learned that we ignore him when he gets talking about things we don't want to discuss. And I sent out a list of guide lines we need to follow. One being that if you post something that might be considered a subject that could be touchy and no one responds.. Move on. It seems to have worked and the classmate came back with his profile and back to normal. I have found it best to send an email to anyone he addresses explaining that we ignore him when he gets this way. He was the bully in high school and still tries to be on the forum. And I think he knows we ignore him so he has been posting flowers and happier thoughts trying to get back in everyone's good graces. I did finally tell him that his being a bully in high school still follows him and people don't want to hear it. Personally I have never met the guy. This isn't my class or my school. I was just trying to do something nice for my husband's class and some of the people I had met over the years after moving to this town. And most of them are very appreciative. So you take the good with the bad

Thanks. I decided not to pull her link, because she hasn't caused any trouble on the website yet. Let sleeping dogs lie, right? She's been emailing me personally, though, and bothering me about not letting people pray at the reunion. I hadn't even thought about it before then, but I may just get up and lead a prayer myself just to make her mad (even though I'm terrified to speak in front of people - lol!).

I moderate several Yahoo groups, so I'm pretty good at blocking insane people's posts. Seems she knows better than to mess with me on the website, though

Jennifer

We had a picnic and one of the classmates announced "before we begin I would like to say a word of prayer. For those who do not wish to participate in the prayer please give us a moment of silence". Maybe you can do some what the same. "Let us have a moment of silence to pray or remember those that can't be with us" Then you don't have to speak in front of anyone other than the announcement and others can collect their thoughts" The subject of prayer came up in on our sight. We call it thoughts and prayer. Prayer for those who do. Thoughts for those who don't.

Jennifer,

You might want to try a similar approach to one I heard about through an e-mail. I can't remember where this took place, so you might want to Google or Snope it.

Supposedly a graduating class was not allowed to pray at their commencement, so they got together and planned a way around the judge's order.

One classmate went to the podium, hesitated a moment, and then sneezed. All who wanted to participate replied, "God Bless You."

I love your idea! Very diplomatic. I know we have people from several different religions, but I've never dealt with the Atheist thing. I'm very easy-going and don't want to offend anyone.

When she first emailed, I related a story to her about when I was in China adopting one of my girls and the guide (whom we'd been with 2 weeks and she was as sweet as she could be) asked us to go into a Bhuddist temple and have the babies blessed. It was really important to her and I didn't want to offend. So, my husband and I entered reluctantly. Then it got very weird with the chanting and insince (sp?) and the monks came around and started to put the red dot ashes on the babies foreheads, and my daughter started screaming bloody murder. I politely got up and left the temple, but I got very dirty looks from the Monks. Apparently, you never leave this kind of service. Anyway, my point was that I was very uncomfortable for my baby and I left. Well, the atheist girl emailed back ranting about "Why should I have to leave the room, blah, blah, blah". I told her she didn't have to, that's just what I would do if I were uncomfortable. She's published 2 books on the subject of atheism, so I know she could debate with me forever - so I decided to drop it.
Jennifer