My Thoughts on Posting Messages on GILLFAMILY.COM

The last thing I want to do is make it more difficult or intimidating for friends and family to participate in GILLFAMILY.COM! On the contrary, I want everyone to feel comfortable playing the games, posting messages on the message boards and shaping any features that they think should be included in the website. I just wanted to touch briefly on why I believe it is important that participation should not be anonymous.

I would certainly hope that we'll meet other Gills, Brennans or just people stopping by while surfing the net. (I hate that phrase!) If you search the name, you'll find that their are quite a few Gill family websites on the net. (By the way, our website probably won't come up when you do a search. I intentionally left the information off the website that most search engines would use to find it. Eventually, I'll add that information.) When a message was recently posted without a recognizable name or nickname, I figured that the message was probably left by a friend or family member who made a slight mistake. However, I recognized the possibility that it might have been posted by somebody (stranger or acquaintance) who was just playing around. I felt it was best to try to find out who left the message or, failing that, delete it.

As I've written previously, most of us are just getting our feet wet with computers and the internet. I'm doing my best to keep this website as easy to understand and use as possible. Everyone can make mistakes...don't let that scare you away from participating! Even I have messed up a few entries regarding the Football Contest. (Please call big brother Mike for more details.) I don't mind fixing the errors when necessary so as to make them clearer. Those of us who have participated from the beginning when I created the website as a home for the Football Contest know we used to have a different message board. Since that message board was maintained and hosted by a third party on their server (computer) it was often slow or completely unavailable. Under the new message board software, I have control of it and it resides on the same server as the rest of GILLFAMILY.COM. This software offers the ability to let everyone edit or delete their own messages. I disabled that feature when I installed the software on GILLFAMILY.COM because I couldn't get it to work correctly. Eventually this feature will be available to us. In the meantime, if you don't like how your message came out when you posted it, just re-post the message with a different subject line. (The software won't let you duplicate the subject). I can delete the first (duplicate) message.

Let me answer a couple of questions that people have asked.