This entirely kindly intentioned thread confounded me a little: I didn't know how (or even whether) it was appropriate to reply.
Many thanks to the posters of the kind comments above.
Regarding all the
unkind comments (by no means limited to this thread), although I don't usually dignify such nonsense with any response at all, I will this time: it's beyond ridiculous that a small handful of people very repeatedly accuse me, in thread after thread after thread, of being NoDoji, a TopStepTrader employee, one of the daughters of Al Brooks, Al Brooks himself, or even a man called "Alex".
It's pure trolling - and ironic, too: anonymous internet personas themselves, so repeatedly alleging (or just stating, as if it were simply factual) that I'm deliberately deceiving people here about my identity.
It's relentless, it's unwarranted, it's untruthful, it's
entirely unprovoked, and it's downright malicious, too:
these comments are designed solely to impugn my integrity in public. Clearly they serve
no other purpose at all. That's just plain
nasty.
I've done
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to deserve, to invite or to justify these endless accusations of deception.
There's no reason, by any normal standards of decency, why anyone should continue indefinitely to tolerate such persistent, unprovoked malice.
Having Asperger's syndrome myself, I'm admittedly really bad at trying to envisage other people's potential reactions, but I imagine (and am assured by many people here) that almost everyone would
eventually feel exactly the same way, when
so continually falsely accused of lying and deceiving people, wouldn't they?
Together with the moderators' express refusal to do anything about this so-persistent, malicious trolling - which would be so easy to remedy - the whole thing, naturally enough, alienates me from posting here.
It's not just about me, obviously (which is why it was worth mentioning at all, for once): there's a much broader, much more significant issue here. At a time when both trading and trading-forum participation generally are seeing such an increase,
this forum clearly has a serious member retention problem. No surprise there: it's glaringly obvious which very small group of persistently hostile members the moderation policies choose to retain and protect, at the expense of inexorably losing a far larger turnover of other contributors. That's how ET is run, and clearly there's nothing that I or any other individual member can do about it but choose to stop posting here -
as, indeed, so many do.
The forum is knowingly harbouring and protecting malicious trolls while effectively driving away their victims.
In my opinion that's a real problem, and apparently it's one that nobody's willing even to
try to deal with.
