Center Moriches Taxpayers Community Discussion Forum

watchdog wrote:

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THANKS.......YEAH MR. BIGSHOT WAS SO IMPRESSED THAT HE HAD THE BOARD TAKEN DOWN, BUT HE IS CLUELESS AND WE WILL GET THE WORD SPREAD TO ALL PARFENTS ABOUT WHAT IS GOING ON.

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Well Aparently, Mr BIGSHOT has called the Pressmm about how he got the forum removed off of proboards and he is running the forum founders name though the mud with his accusations. This article i hope bites him in his rump.  He is looking more and more like the biggest fool in this town.  Let's hope the paper prints about the breech in confidentiality  he did as a board member on what was spoken in executive session about a newly hired administrator and his stance on that hire.

A Center Moriches internet forum for school district and community issues was shut down last week by its commercial server owner for alleged libelous content, Center Moriches School Board member Wayne Vitale said this week. The owner of the site on Thursday confirmed that he had removed the blog after conferring with Mr. Vitale.

In an telephone interview, Mr. Vitale said he felt the forum’s posting on school board members, school administrators and students routinely were inappropriate.

“It’s very straight forward—they were out of control,” Mr. Vitale said. “They were regularly posting libelous content for two years and the company took their website down. End of story.”

The forum’s creator, district parent Kelly Platt, claimed a computer registering Mr. Vitale’s IP address in Bellport was used to attempt to gain access the website’s administration controls.

She said she reported the matter to police, but stopped short of alleging that Mr. Vitale had hacked the website.

Mr. Vitale has denied hacking any website.

“There was an IP tracker that was installed on the website to track IP address activity,” Ms. Platt said. “The person with this IP address tried to get into the administration portion of the website.”

Mr. Vitale, who confirmed that he had viewed the forum shortly before it disappeared, said it was shut down by the owner of the forum’s server, Patrick Clinger. Mr. Vitale said he had asked Mr. Clinger to review the forum, and that Mr. Clinger had made the decision himself to shut it down for what he considered inappropriate content.

Mr. Clinger, the founder and owner of ProBoards, confirmed that he had shut the forum down but declined to comment further.

In a February 11 letter from Mr. Clinger to Mr. Vitale that Mr. Vitale posted on his website, vitalecmboard.blogspot.com, Mr. Clinger wrote libelous content involved in the forum’s closure. There was no hacking, he wrote.

“The forum cmtaxpayer.proboards99.com was removed from our servers by ProBoards due to content which we determined may be libelous,” Mr. Clinger wrote in the message. “This forum, to our current knowledge, was not in fact ‘hacked,’ as some have claimed.”

In the same posting, Mr. Vitale wrote he had posted Mr. Clinger’s letter to debunk rumors that he had hacked the website.

“Inasmuch as there have been malicious and defamatory accusations circulating in certain quarters, I thought it appropriate, indeed necessary, to post it here. The message is self explanatory,” Mr. Vitale wrote.

The Center Moriches Community Taxpayers Discussion Forum was active on proboards99.com for more than two years. It has since moved to activeboard.com. As of Wednesday, the forum had 27 registered members. The forum continues to focus on town and school district issues.

Following the blog’s shutdown last week, rumors circulated in the community that it had been closed due to hacking.

Ms. Platt said the forum was intended to keep the community abreast of “issues within the town and issues within the school district.” She said she knew of only a few instances of comments that should not have been posted because they were inappropriate.

One such instance concerned the appointment of former Oysterponds Superintendent of Schools Rita Mattus as an interim associate principal at the Center Moriches High School in October 2008. Ms. Platt said those comments were deleted.

“It was getting to the point to where there were libelous posts and that post was taken down,” Ms. Platt said.

As the forum grew in popularity, with “over 500 hits in one day,” she said, it became impossible to monitor all the postings. “It’s very hard to sift through every single post,” Ms. Platt said. “It’s very time consuming.”

But she insisted the overall content was not libelous. “It was run efficiently in my opinion,” Ms. Platt said. “There was no slanderous material, in my opinion. To me it was an informative site” for school district residents and taxpayers.

A Center Moriches resident who asked to remain anonymous, but regularly viewed the forum around the time of the appointment of Ms. Mattus, said the content was often negative. The resident said the forum seemed like “the same four people” making all the postings.

“It seemed like it was just the opinions of a few people and it was extremely negative and it was less than truthful,” the resident said.

now that the article about the site is out in peoples hands,  i think it's time someone write a letter to the editor and expose him for what he really is.  the letter should contain what he said on the blog and how he violated confidential law as being a board of ed member.  i hope he is impeached out of his seat.

boeobserver wrote:

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has anyone noticed that the cm schools webboard is down.   ok  who took it down ?

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