Now, there's an idea. You take my brood and I'll take yours. Chris can't refuse having a Pug that way!

In World of Warcraft we suddenly had a member of a guild, known to us only through the game suddenly disappear. Lani eventually got worried enough to say something and of course once she brought it up everybody quickly worked themselves into a state of assuming the worst (WoW also once caused me to decide something horrible had happened to Lani but some of you alread know that story).

It was quite a research challenge to track him down based solely on minimal conversational clues but eventually we did. Turned out his computer had melted down and he didn't think anybody'd care enough to find a way to let anybody know.

And I do remember the work we did to track down our NYC members at MousePad after 9/11 (not that we had many).

I was deep into some chat rooms when I had my miscarriage. I had logged on to tell a friend I was having bleeding issues. When 4 hours went by without hearing from me she called. She notified everyone else. 5 months later, with my car accident, the same sort of thing happened. I called one person and they notified the people who would want to know.

Wow. I just found something interesting. I went hunting and happened to notice - there are a ton of fluff threads that died as soon as 9/11 happened. The midnight society was obviously alive and well with 2am postings in many silly threads, but the next morning they all went dead and sank down into history, frozen in time like so many ash-covered Pompeiians.

Even more interestingly, the first post at MP talking about the crash revealed JRob's unfortunate dream. Crazy.

I also noticed that at Mousepad there's a 500 post limit if you want to "Find all posts by" anyone.

well, who'd be loser enough to do more than 500 posts on a chat board, for heavens sake ?!?!

That's a vB setting.

Yes, we have the same limit here.

So, with all the wonders of the internet, why isn't there some sort of subscriber service for e-notifying whomever your list of net contacts is in the case of your expiration?



More to the point ... what do you think we can charge per month if we institute such a system from the LoT, and open it to all comers?

How would the service know you died?