I’m Chris, a 37 year old father of two who resides in Baton Rouge, LA with his family, two cats, and a growing collection of Mazda 626 maintenance receipts.
I was inspired to create lurid.org as a means to learn perl and php after watching gyrate.org grow more polished and popular as Mike’s skill improved. Shortly thereafter, the blogging scene exploded and easy to use content management packages started cropping up, negating the need to learn php for web authoring, but leaving me with a registered domain. Initially, I resisted the pre-packaged blogging approach, but soon discovered it was a lot easier to use Movabletype than to write it from scratch myself.
Why the name “lurid.org”? No particular reason, really. It’s short, easy to remember and five-letter word domain names were rare even back in May 2000 when I registered it. Despite the name, there is no “lurid” content of any type to be found here.
The Suicide Saga
In early 2003, I wrote several posts about the suicide chat rooms that were popping up on the net. For about a year thereafter, I had the #1 Google pagerank for “suicide chat” and “suicide chat rooms”.
In November 2003, a BBC Channel 4 program called Chatted to Death mentioned lurid.org as pro-suicide site (which it most certainly is not), and showed close-up shots of someone typing the site’s name into a browser, etc.
Traffic shot up dramatically and a community developed around the site– I added Lurid Forums (now defunct, see below) and Lurid Chat. Many debates were had, friendships made, cliques established and everyone had a jolly time.
This experience motivated me to become a volunteer suicide crisis intervention counselor. You can read about it here, here and here.
A few months later, a man named Alan Quigley from Ireland posted messages threatening suicide, which was not uncommon on a site which lots of discussion about suicide was happening. But on Valentine’s Day, 2004, Alan followed through with his threads and died by suicide. His siblings, angered over lurid.org “causing their brothers death” went to the media. The Lancashire Evening Post picked up the story and interviewed me. While I didn’t feel responsible for Alan’s death, I did begin to worry about my position legally. While I wasn’t concerned about my standing with the laws of the US (which, despite it’s many shortcomings does have strong freedom of expression laws), I realized that I could be in danger legally if the laws of other countries were applied to the site. In particular, Australia’s suicide law banning internet suicide discussion. Additionally, after finishing my crisis intervention training, I realized that giving suicidal people an open forum to talk to one another, largely, about being suicidal was not the best way to help them. As I wrote back then–
Before my training, I thought that giving users an open forum to discuss issues related to suicide and suicide prevention would help alleviate the sense of loneliness and isolation that many of them shared. I still believe that open discussion about suicide is the best way to prevent it. But what I failed to consider is that I was not providing a source of unbiased communication. Through my Google pagerank, people found Lurid by searching for suicide chatrooms. Ergo, I was building a community of suicidal individuals. Even though open discussion about suicide is needed, I now understand that open discussion about suicide between two suicidal individuals is not the best mode of therapy.
At that point, I decided to shut lurid down. The Lancashire Evening Post ran a story titled “Suicide chatroom is closed down” which got as many facts wrong as it did right. I’m an Oracle & SQL Server DBA, not a suicide counselor, I didn’t set up lurid to be a suicide themed site, etc.
The users were pretty pissed off, which prompted LEP to run another story called “Death squad” fury as suicide web site closes. Some of my very passionate and protective users (you know who you are, tmo, delight and crew) were a tad upset and took it out on the LEP editors and author of the story. Good times.
I left the site down for about 3 months, long enough to lose my pagerank and have things settle down a bit. I brought the main site back up, but left Lurid Forums offline for good.
