...and breath!!
Yes, everyone, please!! Things have been a little helter-skelter the past couple of weeks and we all need to take a breather and not be so quick to leave this wonderful community!!! I've said this once, but I think it's worth mentioning again...the downfall of written word is that sometimes it can misconstrued to something it wasn't originally meant to be. Without the aide of facial expressionss and voice intonation...it is easy to misinterpret what someone might have been trying to say. If you are unsure, don't hesitate to ask that person in a PM, so both that person and yourself can be put at ease of the misunderstanding!

I think we all deserver big **hugs** this week and a stress reliever. That is the main reason I come here, and I do hate to see people getting upset and wanting to leave over such circumstances!
Karen and Paul have created a wonderful place out of love, and no doubt there is a lot of it here!

It is easy to be duped by hoaxes as some of them do appear to be legitimate. I was one of those people not 3 years ago...but it's easy to learn how to identify hoaxes. But, when in doubt, consider anything emailed to you a hoax. I posted a bunch of links for "hoax-busting" here . You can go to any of these sites to confirm any of your suspicions. I posted this on the other thread, but thought it would be worth mentioning again.

How to Recognize a Hoax
Probably the first thing you should notice about a warning is the request to "send this to everyone you know" or some variant of that statement. This should raise a red flag that the warning is probably a hoax. No real warning message from a credible source will tell you to send this to everyone you know.

Next, look at what makes a successful hoax. There are two known factors that make a successful hoax, they are:

(1) technical sounding language.
(2) credibility by association.
If the warning uses the proper technical jargon, most individuals, including technologically savvy individuals, tend to believe the warning is real. For example, the Good Times hoax says that "...if the program is not stopped, the computer's processor will be placed in an nth-complexity infinite binary loop which can severely damage the processor...". The first time you read this, it sounds like it might be something real. With a little research, you find that there is no such thing as an nth-complexity infinite binary loop and that processors are designed to run loops for weeks at a time without damage.

When we say credibility by association we are referring to who sent the warning. If the janitor at a large technological organization sends a warning to someone outside of that organization, people on the outside tend to believe the warning because the company should know about those things. Even though the person sending the warning may not have a clue what he is talking about, the prestige of the company backs the warning, making it appear real. If a manager at the company sends the warning, the message is doubly backed by the company's and the manager's reputations.

Both of these items make it very difficult to claim a warning is a hoax so you must do your homework to see if the claims are real and if the person sending out the warning is a real person and is someone who would know what they are talking about. You do need to be a little careful verifying the person as the apparent author may be a real person who has nothing to do with the hoax. If thousands of people start sending them mail asking if the message is real, that essentially constitutes an unintentional denial of service attack on that person. Check the person's web site or the person's company web site to see if the hoax has been responded to there. Check these pages or the pages of other hoax sites to see if we have already declared the warning a hoax.

Hoax messages also follow the same pattern as a chain letter