A quick look at those posts on the Earthboppin Web site was a good reminder to me of the importance of the need to maintain a civil tone in scientific discussions in bulletin board posts.

For one thing, I have found that many serious researchers around the world simply won’t participate in discussions anywhere if anyone’s posts at the site regarding any subject contain offensive words and phrases or negative attack posts.

For another, people need to remember that inappropriate material that they post to a bulletin board could be used for or against them in a variety of ways in the future.

For example, if you apply for a job in the area of politics or in some type of security or safety field, your prospective employer might have his or her own personnel department or some outside organization run a search on the Internet for anything you posted anywhere over the years. And what you said could be stored in permanent records by various organizations even after the original blog disappears. So, your language, ideas, attitudes, and even the grammar and spelling in your posts could be used to determine if you are offered the job or if you are rejected in favor of someone else who was more careful about what he or she said or who never posted anything anywhere.

Every post to every bulletin board should probably be regarded as part of a future job application by anyone who is still actively working. With retired people, who cares? They aren’t worried about impressing some potential employer and can probably afford to have some fun.

Among other things, my own work presently involves providing free advice to governments regarding ways they can solve or at least manage problems that threaten the health and life of their citizens. Earthquake forecasting is just one of many of those projects that I have in some state of development. Quite a few past efforts have been extremely successful. And if you examine my posts over the years you can see that an effort has been made to keep the language civil etc. Government officials etc. who then might read the posts are not offended by them even though they might not understand or agree with the science concepts discussed in the posts.

I generally won’t post to many other bulletin boards because of the negative comments and language being used there. People who do might run into a “guilt by association” problem.

These are personal opinions.