I want to agree w/ Gina and 116107...

(this thread was moved from the Truth in Medicine)
.. in the posts below. I tell people to read HV's pages but not the other forums so much, especially if they have busy lives and not much free time.
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There's an opaqueness to CZ, and there has to be. Without anonymity would we talk in such explicit detail about intimate health issues? And if it's true that CZ started as a Liver Flushing forum, that anonymity is probably in its DNA. But there's a flip side to that - namely how tough it is to trust what you read, and also how tough it is for knowledgeable people to establish their credibility. After all, "if you're so smart why are you hiding behind the name FuzzyBearToes2000?"

Some forum owners aren't afraid to use their real names (nor afraid of lawsuits). So at least you know they're committed to it and maybe have an area of expertise. But in many of the forums the experience is very different. It's like going into a cave. Murky, and it takes you 6 weeks to figure out who the regulars are and the moderator if there is one. That person who responded to your post has decent grammar so you wonder, do they really know what they're talking about? A PhD perhaps? Or an unbalanced wingnut who thinks purple is the color of the Devil.

A while back I suggested to the WM in his thread that the usernames of the moderators of each forum be listed, at the upper right of the page. This was promptly ignored. No, wait, I take it back - 6 out of 7 voted to Disagree. But I still think this is a good idea. If a forum is no one's responsibility, or at least not patently, what are the chances that the rules and TOS will be enforced and that the standards will be high?

Take the Christianity Debate Forum - who moderates that? How about the Autism Forum? "Sara's Soup Kitchen" - you would think it's run by someone named Sara. But after a little while you realize it's run by mo123 (b/c she does most of the posting) whose real name is apparently not Sara but Barbi.

After being here several months I gathered that the owner and/or Webmaster is someone named Dushan. (And that there's someone named Hanna involved.) After several minutes of internet searching I found out his last name and his country. CZ gets 70 thousand hits per day, ranks right up there w/ Mercola - yet not a *single* word about it on Wikipedia.

Ahh, the opacity. The anonymity.

I'll still visit CZ. There's lots of good info. And laughs. The Iodine forum has solid info on iodine, for e.g., apart from the fringe characters who frequent it (hey, in somebody's eyes I'M a fringe character). But most of the information I've gotten, and the best information, has been from the T in M forum. So if current conditions hold, guess I'll see you at boards2togo.com slash MMB.

Is it possible that CZ is - can't believe I'm about to say it - TOO democratic?
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