#37 Responses from Prison talk's hate mail (retro)

Responses from Prison Talk’s hate mail

“I am very sorry you had to get such a hateful message from Fed-X, who supposedly ought to know what ex felons have gone through.”

“I never liked PTO because many of the moderators were like jerks, they don’t know what they are missing”

“I used to read as many of your posts on PTO that I could find, it is a shame that there are people who call themselves “prison support” can act so hatefully”

“I am glad I left PTO, now I see what the owner is really about”

And many others….

Today I am sipping on a hot cup of coffee, answering emails from the last blog I put up, and I wanted to answer a couple of questions. First off, I am very thankful that there are people who stuck up for me. In fact, there are a few readers here that are still members of PTO, but asked me not to share their name because they would not want to be banned for “knowing me”.

I can understand.

But it appears to me that PTO has no idea how to help people except to share in their misery; you know what they say, misery loves company.

So today I want to take a moment to talk about a couple things about this prison blog, and the problem with people on other prison support sites in what they claim to know. The first thing I want to tackle is the reason why I changed my format to have members of Blogspot only to respond.

The original idea was not that way, because I originally welcomed every response that was positive. But when I left PTO, or rather they banned me, it was apparent that some nosey members there were reading my blogs, then running back like a gossip queen to PTO to tell them what I said about them.

Note to anyone like that…I have the right to say what I want on MY blog…whether David Frisk (Fed-X), likes it or not.

But what was happening was that these cowards were making cheap shots on my blog under the anonymous title. Well, any coward can run their mouth and hide behind a tree while throwing rocks, it takes no heart to do that. But yet there were several PTO members who did that, saying all kinds of nasty words “in the name of Fed-X”.

Well, since those people never identified themselves, I figured I would not give those cowards that kinda satisfaction anymore, so I changed the settings to eliminate those kinda silly words. The drawback to that is that many of my readers are not Blogspot members, so it made it harder for them to make a comment to support my blogs.

That’s why I urge you guys to email me at derf4000 (at) embarqmail (dot) com to let me know what you want me to talk about. As I said before, I take my cue from those that need it, so if you emailed me about wanting to know more about prison canteen, I can talk about it. If you emailed me about wanting to know about being in the hole, I can blog about that. I leave that up to you…if you ask.

But thank your wonderful and dedicated friends at PTO for the reason why I changed the settings.

The second thing I wanted to talk about was an issue one of the members, some lysbeth or something, said about me. On a post awhile back, she argued that my writing 1200 posts was nothing because she had 25,000 posts on PTO. She was degrading my posts based only on number, and because she had 25,000 posts, it was far greater than my “measly” 1200 posts, meaning she was greater than me, and had contributed more.

Uh…folks, don’t buy into that.

I want to explain why this is nothing but misleading info from her, and I challenge any person who has EVER written on prison issues to prove me wrong on this. I say to you that I never claimed to be the best writer in prison issues, but I think I can make a strong case that I have written MORE on it than anybody online.

How so?

Well, let’s start with the blogs you are reading. I have nearly 250 blogs on this site at the moment, right? Well, if you have been following my blogs, then you KNOW I don’t write too many short blogs. Most of my blogs have been averaging about 4 pages long, some longer, some shorter. Now, doing the math, that means I may have about 1000 pages…NOT POSTS, on this site right now.

Now I admit about 10-20 are retro blogs, ones I wrote before and brought back, but we’re still talking about 900 pages of my writing…in just about a year or so, right?

Note, I said pages, not posts. A post can be as simple as this:

“Hi, and welcome to PTO”.

That folks, is considered a post. It takes no effort, no heart, and no ability to type that out. Now, this lysbeth person said she wrote about 25,000 posts…let’s look into that.

I know that PTO is not that old, in fact one of the few things that David Frisk and I have in common is that we got out about the same time. I know this because I have a post on PTO that was written on an “anniversary” of my release, and Fed-X responded himself, noting that he got out about the same time as I did….

See, he reads my posts too, contrary to what he said in that nasty letter he sent me…

But let’s just say this lysbeth character DID write 25,000 posts in let’s say, 5 years. Let’s just assume she has been with PTO for five years. This means, in average, she would have written about 5000 posts PER YEAR.

Now, anybody on PTO can easily check the number of posts of each member, and if she says she wrote 25,000, then I supposed that cannot be argued…but that is not my point.

Let’s say she wrote 5000 per year…wow, that’s a heck of a lot of writing, huh? That would break down to about 2500 every 6 months….wow, she must have 20 fingers.

Going further, that breaks down to about 416 posts per MONTH, and about 104 per week! That’s almost 15 posts a DAY! She must go through a computer a month, right?

I mean, that is a heck of a lot of writing per DAY on PTO, to have amassed 25,000 posts. I wrote for PTO for about 2 years and got 1200 under masonik4, and a couple hundred more under Nolaw97. Was she THAT great on the keyboard?

Folks, in the world of sports, there are always stats that you can “fudge” to make it seem like you are better than someone else. It gives the illusion that one person is better merely on numbers, when the truth is in the actual fruit.

One of the best 3-point shooters in the NBA history was Reggie Miller, and I think he shot about 40% from the 3-point line. Now, if I went out there and shot TWO 3-point shots, and hit one, that says I am 50%. Would that mean I am better than Reggie Miller, who shot HUNDREDS of those threes? No it would not.

When I wrote on PTO, it wasn’t some cheap comment that took 10 seconds to write. See, a lot of people on PTO have figured out how to cheat the numbers by making a simple statement, then copying and pasting it on hundreds of other’s posts.

There is a forum for new members, where the introduce themselves and their problems. What a lot of these PTO members do is type this simple sentence:

“Hi and welcome to PTO”

Or some variation that takes less than a half a minute to do. Then, they copy that sentence and then go and paste it on as many new members as they can. Most of those people don’t even READ those new member’s post, they just copy and paste it so they get the count for the post. This lysbeth character obviously did that, and I must admit, did it very well. I mean, inside of an hour, how many times can you copy and paste insincere words like that? 20 times? 50 times?

How many then, inside of a few hours, a few days, and a few weeks?

You see then how easy it is to generate high numbers for your posts without every helping a single soul. And the sad thing is that those new members will actually believe people like lysbeth really care about them. It would really be a shame if there is a member who has some real problems, thinking they will get some help, but have like 15 identical responses to their post that say, “hi and welcome to PTO”, or “I am so sorry to hear about your problem, but there are great people here that can help”.

Next time you check on any prison support site, look for those who make those very short posts, and make them often. These are not people that really want to help, they want to use your post to generate more posts for them.

And yet, there are so many people on PTO that are like that. Now, I am not the fastest typist in the world, but I DO know how to type. I took typing in high school, and did a lot of typing in college to hone my skills. Because I am on the computer a lot, I have become pretty good at typing. But for me to type a sincere blog or post of 4 pages or so, it would take me about 45 minutes to do.

Now, if lysbeth was indeed putting about 15 posts a day on PTO, we have to look at two options. Is she just “running up numbers” as many members do, or is she really writing legit posts? Even if she wrote some decent posts, to write 15 of them a day is a heck of a lot of time…do you REALLY think she is doing that?

Hey, there are days I can write up a streak, but NOBODY can do that every single day for 5 years. So again, do you really think she has 25,000 quality posts on PTO?

I don’t either.

But this does not mean she has none, even a person with that many posts can every now and then make a sincere post or two. But the fact about many PTO members and especially moderators is that they glory in one or two sentence posts, and make great numbers with them. When I wrote for them, I don’t believe I ever wrote a single sentence post, almost all of mine were quite lengthy.

What I gave them was quality, not quantity. Anybody who does not care about you can say “hi and welcome to PTO” and share that same post 10,000 times, and say something like “thanks for sharing this post” another 5000 times, and “sorry to hear about your problem” another 5000 times and get 20,000 posts in no time.

But the problem here is that these people are making themselves out to be someone they are not. If I really need some advice or help, I might be fooled to hear from someone who has 25,000 posts and think, “hey, this person must really be an expert, they have 25,000 posts”, not knowing that 99% of them were copy and paste messages. So people put their faith in a person who was actually using the site to make themselves greater than others.

And then you get the blind leading the blind….

So I do not believe this lysbeth person is sincere, and I do not believe she cares about the members of PTO. She defends it because she likes her position as some “expert” when she really isn’t.

The easiest way to prove that is simply to look at those posts. You don’t have to check all 25,000, just get an idea of whether there is a pattern in what she says. On most sites that is as simple as finding the member and looking at all their past posts. I guarantee you that there will be a definite pattern of similarly written posts that took seconds to write and paste.

But these are the members of PTO, who seem to swear by the name of David Frisk.

Anyway, I had to post that because there are a lot of people who knew me at PTO and other prison support sites, and understand what I am saying. That last post I put up stirred up a lot of my readers to encourage me to keep writing and talking about prison issues.

Thanks guys, I appreciate that.

So we’ll continue to talk about prison issues. And as I said before, feel free to email me at derf4000 (at) embarqmail (dot) com to ask about my books, cards or if you have a question about prison, just ask. I don’t take nasty emails, but in the case of Fed-X, I felt it was important for some of you to see what he really thought about me, and those like me…not much support in that, is there?