walt d.

I had paid for a lifetime membership many years ago. The word was that the new owners were disgruntled about life members from whom they would not be able to collect revenue.

If you have HSV, you should know that HSV groups in major cities have 'major' events once a year for people with HSV that people often come from great distances to attend. MPWH in years past posted a calendar of all these events and listed the local support groups.

I did not know that the new MPWH owners were in spats with many (most?) of the local support groups and had removed all the information from the website. In a PRIVATE PRIVATE PRIVATE conversation with a friend from a town about 180 miles from mine, I asked them if they were going to attend one of the major, annual meetings coming up. I had asked only this one person and was not affiliated with the event I asked about.

The sysop deleted my account because, she said, I was soliciting and promoting non-website-related events. ONE person, in a PRIVATE conversation. I know that sysops need to keep spammers of their site but spying on targeted members and deleting their profile because they paid for a lifetime membership is way beyond anything justifiable.

FWIW, the story in the community was the founder was a very nice guy who went by two initials. He went through a divorce and in the breakup, his ex wound up with the website. She was a real piece of work and frantic to generate revenue and viewed local support groups as competition because they were an alternate way to meet HSV people. She pulled all the news and listings of local groups. If anybody discussed their local group in a forum they were warned that was considered promoting. I got one of those warnings so I never made mention of a group again. But in a single PRIVATE conversation with ONE friend, I asked if they were attending the yearly get together and my 10 year account was deleted.