Do I go “Private”?

The message board I help administer has suddenly taken an interest in Dear Diary. I had expected a few of the more adventuresome of our crew to go exploring here, but I did not expect that this place would suddenly turn half a dozen of them into Diary Junkies. Half of me is amused, the other half alarmed.

I had truly believed I would be able to keep this diary totally separate and private from the message board’s diary. I’ve taken care to allow an interval of hours pass between post updates to each, so that someone wandering into Dear Diary after reading a message board update wouldn’t stumble into Salamander and recognize her. I’ve also avoided using any names from the board in here, even though they are pseudonyms, so that a search of the diaries for one of their names wouldn’t kick this diary out.

I wanted this Salamander diary because it gave me access to leaving notes to other diaries of people I was coming to admire or feel I had things in common with. It gave me a chance to express my thoughts without anything getting back to the message board (and therefore, back to the Professor, who is head administrator of the board). I really needed a place where I wasn’t role-playing hostess 24/7, if that makes any sense.

It was totally unexpected, but I’m starting to see cross traffic between the two diaries from people at Dear Diary. Anyone from DD who has read my Salamander chronicles would readily recognize the other diary I keep here, so I suspect I’ve already been found out that way.

To further complicate things, one of the other board members has started an online diary of his character here, which is slowly being discovered by the others in our cybercommunity. Since I don’t know when he’ll be posting updates, I run the risk of updating Salamander simultaneous to his updates. this increases my chances of being “found out”.

To put the diary on private defeats one of the major reasons I set it up to begin with – to give myself an identity on DD. I’ll feel a real loss if I get forced into this corner, even though this diary is barely three weeks old.

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