Nobody on this forum should blame themselves for what Chris McKinstry did.  His message was cross-posted to our Yahoo! Robitron group of 200+ members, several of whom took parallel measures to those reported on ?off, such as contacting police and embassies.  For all we know, Chris may have posted his message elsewhere and contacted other people as well. 

Robitron is a watering hole for Loebner Prize and Turing Test enthusiasts, chatterbot progammers, and other related A.I. mad scientists.  Chris posted quite a few flames there and left more than one of us with guilty feelings about our responses to his theories.

Hats off to Robitron for not even considering for one moment shutting down its forum over this incident.

Careful you'll have a lot of psychopathic posters on your hands at this rate.

http://antyx.blogspot.com/2006/01/chris-mckinstry-is-dead-and-i-wont-be.html

I don't blame myself one bit. :)

Dr. Wallace -

Thank you for your encouraging words and for your message (I think I've seen you post a number of places now including ?off and maybe kuro5hin?)

Pardon me for saying so, but it seems that every time you post, you insert a bit of an advertisement for your little group there.  It seems very tacky.  I'd stop doing that.

But thank you for the seemingly well intentioned message, nonetheless.

Is there a K5 article?  Anyone got a link?

Getting beat up in the queue, as usual

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/1/25/111113/520

Isn't Advertising one of the 7 stages of Grieving?

My mistake, it was Acceptance :-)

Permission Denied, motherfucker.

Oh, you have to have an account to see unpublished articles.  I always forget that.

Can't be helped.

For some reason Michael Crawford is describing in his typical link-heavy, fullsome way about BPD.  I know my heart shouldn't sink but when I see his name at the top of something, it's like when you see an Albert Kallal post and you just know without even looking that its going to include lengthy descriptions of something in MS access.

You mean you actually read Crawford's articles/comments?

I usually give up after about the 3rd or 4th google bomb, or the sixth manic diary entry or article trying to right all the perceived wrongs in the world.  Or him pretending to be a frog to whore adsense.

Who has received more free advertising from this tragedy than Joel Spolsky?  Isn't the story now "Joel Spolsky shuts down popular web forum after suicide note posted by member turns out to be real?"  I never heard of Joel Spolsky before.  I heard of Chris McKinstry.

Sorry if that's you Michael :-)  You are still an adsense whore though.

It IS true that Joel's name is getting attached to this story, which I think at first was intended to be derogatory, but now it seems to be made out like Joel had the sad but necessary duty of closing ?off, which is bullshit.

There was a kuro5hin article on there a while back -- I'm still getting a fair amount of traffic from it:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/1/24/203853/458

Fuck knows how they found my site -- I wasn't showing up on Google when it the story was posted -- but find it they did.

You were in Wikipedia...

<<Nobody on this forum should blame themselves for what Chris McKinstry did. >>

...blame implies that he did something wrong.