Welcome to the Small Penis Syndrome forum

[Mark]

This forum has been created to offer a space where a serious discussion of Small Penis Syndrome can occur. I repost my message dated August 3, 2009 below as to why this particular forum has come to be here at this time:

Editor's Note: August 3rd, 2009: Several days ago, after watching a disturbing trend of angry comments start to bloom into outright advocacy of aggression (something we could not allow), we decided to turn off comments on our series of Small Penis Syndrome (SPS) articles. We regret that it has come to this as we have become amply aware that it is important that people have a place to go on the Internet where they can talk about this powerful anxiety and the shame that surrounds it. Today, we are restoring read-access to the older comments, but are not going to accept any new comments on the essays themselves. Instead, we ask that people interested in discussing Small Penis Syndrome please visit the special Small Penis Syndrome forum we have set up within our Mental Help Net Community especially for this purpose. We regret any inconvenience this shift in venue has or will cause those interested in participating in the discussion.

My hope is that we can move the discussion resulting from Dr. Schwartz' essays to this place, which I believe is far more suited to the back and forth discussion format that has evolved. As well, because this forum is part of an actual community software system, we can better handle moderation tasks which seem to be necessary here (so as to keep the level of aggression down to some acceptable threshold.

The question of anonymity will come up. I had proposed the idea of moving the discussion regarding Small Penis Syndrome to the community before and several commentors had said that they would never sign up for a community account - that they would only post under conditions of complete anonymity. So let's talk about how this works.

Let's make this much clear. The article-comment system did not require an account - this is true so it created the illusion of anonymity, but posts there were never truly anonymous. Every time a comment was created, the IP and a timestamp of the posting computer was logged. That we do this is and has been clearly stated in our Terms and Conditions document. This makes the commenters theoretically tracable (if someone had enough clout to gain access to a commentors's ISP DHCP logs so as to connect a leased IP to an identity), but though this is theoretically possible, it is just not likely to ever occur. Realistically considered, hackers and spooks are going to be more interested in matters of theft or national security respectively than in someone's penis size.

Here in the community, the community software also logs IPs and timestamps. It goes a little further as well, requiring a valid email address (and a dance where you will be sent an authorization code to which you have to respond before you can gain access). A final hurdle we have set up is that new accounts are not permitted to post widely until at least one existing member person has "voted them in". New members are limited to posting in the "new members post here sandbox" until that voting has occurred. Those these requirements may seem invasive, they are there to protect the integrity of the community from spammers and the like.

If you are concerned about being anonymous in your postings, you should do the following:

1. get yourself a copy of TOR - the onion router. This proxy system will route your posts through a series of computers so as to hide your IP address. The IP address which will be logged by the system here will be the one associated with the last layer of the TOR routing system and not your originating IP. There are TOR plugins for Firefox, etc.

2. get yourself a hotmail style email address to handle the correspondance that is necessary to establish the account and then later abandon it if you wish.

That's all for now. I hope that we can restart the discussion and also keep it civil. I do recognize that people are hurting out there. We just need to make sure that we talk about emotionally productive sorts of things and not stuff that will cause harm.

Mark