Shut the Front Door

I am pretty much the laziest and most easily distracted person alive. Despite my failures in communication with blog friends and two completely defunct-through-neglect blogs not to mention this one, I'm starting another venture - Shut the Front Door.

Lately I have wanted to say more here than I can without fear of being outed or compromising my anonymity. It all sounds very dramatic when it couldn't be more pedestrian, as I really just wanted to talk more about job frustrations but don't feel comfortable doing so here. I'm friends on Facebook with people I work with, so that's out, and Twitter...well, what can you really say in 140 characters anyway?

It came to me recently that it would be nice to have a members-only online forum to take any similar concerns private so they were not readable to all of the internet. Yes, there are password-protected posts, but I'll be honest - not only can I not be bothered to do that on my own posts and notify readers of the password, but I never remember others' passwords either. Again with the lazy.

It will be a private forum, and all memberships will need to be approved by me. I want to make sure it is a space in which everyone feels comfortable to share freely without the accompanying paranoia that I get when I talk about certain things on my blog. It's obviously not a replacement blog, because lord knows I would never tend to that either if so, but on the odd occasion you feel the need to talk about work, marital issues, sexual concerns, or if you're worried that your cat is trying to kill you, come hither. There are comment functions, so you would be able to get feedback on what you are saying just as you would on your blog.

It will not be a place for talking about any bloggers in a negative way, so behave yourselves. I also do not intend for any detailed personal information to be posted there, so it's not as if anyone will be providing their addresses, names of places of employment, or even real names of spouses/kids/etc (unless you are comfortable with that). I suppose you could be anonymous based on the name you set up in the account, but I will need to know who you are in the initial stage (as in blog name or connection to this collection of bloggers)for membership purposes. That information would obviously not go beyond my inbox if required of course.

I've started this here. I have no idea whether this site is any good at forum hosting, so we shall see how it goes. If you go to the search box in the upper left of the homepage and type in "Shut the front door" the forum will come up with the option to join. This may work, or it may be a complete fucking disaster. We shall see!

UPDATE: It appears as if forum.com is shit. Not only can some of you not access it, but I as the administrator cannot even log in. Hmph. It is a beta version after all, but really. I guess I will spend some of my evening post-ice cream dinner with P looking at other options.