Published on 12, July, 2020
Today completes an important step for the National Autistic Society. Today with Rule 13 they complete the abdication of responsibility for supporting autistic adults reaching out for help.You may remember in 2021 that the National Autistic Society closed its general helpline. There was a thread about it on this forum. As was pointed out at the time from that point onwards this forum became the only port of call at the National Autistic Society for help for people who did not qualify for one of the remaining helplines.And the remaining helplines pertain to children in school, children leaving school and parents of autistic children. The National Autistic Society has become a defacto children’s charity leaving autistic adults out in the cold.Now not content with refusing to help autistic adults they now seek to reduce autistic adults ability to help each other. I fully admit that a bunch of amateurs on an autistic support forum is a poor substitute for professional help. However the vast majority of those seeking such help now have nowhere to go professional or otherwise.Some of you know that I also brought a lawsuit against an organisation for discrimination. I reached out to the citizens advice bureau and got no useful help. I reached out to the EASS and they said that they couldn’t help me because the other party would not engage with them. I wrote to established academics with a background in discrimination law and autism and they said they couldn’t help me.Yes I rang that autism helpline back when it existed, back when I tried to get some justice and they said we can’t help you. But at least I spoke to someone who admitted that he was supposed to be able to help me. That helping me was what he was there for.With regard to the law when you bring a case for discrimination most of the time legal aid is not available. This is in part because the majority of discrimination cases go through the small claims track which is intended to operate without lawyers.Something similar applies to the health service. It’s very easy for autistic people to get sidelined in the health service particularly if they are bad at articulating their needs and concerns. Again I know this from personal experience.At this point if autistic adults come to this forum or the loved ones of autistic adults come to this forum and say they are having difficulty with the law or discrimination or a medical issue rule 13 interpreted strictly means that we can provide no helpful advice other than pointing to sources of help that in fact do not exist.For quite some time now I have run a website dedicated to helping autistic people defend their rights and oppose discrimination. I chose not to include a forum on that website because I was aware that policing it could involve a substantial amount of work. However this development has persuaded me to change my mind. So I’m announcing that areyoualien.uk now has a forum for autistic people. The focus of this forum like the website is advocating for autistic rights in government policy and the law and opposing discrimination. You are all very much welcome there.
As for me I really don't know why I bother. I go to all the work of adding a forum. No one uses it. People clearly are upset about this, but no one is upset enough to spend 30 seconds registering on the forum I made. ... it's not as if I was presenting an either or choice ... sigh.
With the greatest respect, because you are anonymous on here, nobody knows who you are. I imagine they are being cautious like me.
In fairness that sort of data mining would apply equally to this forum which is open to everyone to see. I have the same no identifying information rule on my forum this one has. But you can’t keep everything about your life secret and say much at all. Particularly if you’re trying to share personal experience.
The possibility that someone can reconstruct identifying information from lots of small individually not identifying details is as just as much a risk here as anywhere else.
Peter, this is a general observation and not aimed at you personally. I do not know you, I do not what security you have on your server, and I have no way of finding out. Even if you are legit (which I have no reason to doubt) it does not mean that one of yours users might not be "dodgy". > The same aplies here.< Even if one uses a "disposable" email address and logs in using a secure bowser and / or a VPN, there is data for mining.
I did some training on preventing internet child abuse, and the police officer showed us how he had been able to "profile" his teenage neice, with her and her parents permission. All I will say is that it involved cross-referencing social media, a name here, a location there ... She replied to a message from the nice teenage boy who contacted her online, and it was her uncle. Scary!
In fairness that’s true of any new thing. Once upon a time NAS was a bunch of unknown people. Any new thing needs it’s first few members to just take the plunge and join in without there being a track record go on.
in terms of personal information all i could collect Beyond any other forum user would be email addresses, and passwords. And you could make a new email address and password if you want to just for the site.
l actually strictly speaking I don’t have access to the plaintext passwords either only the hashes. Although come to think of it I can see peoples IP addresses as The forum admin