Something I have been thinking about a lot lately literally hit home recently. We went to a smaller church last year, and the youth pastor had encouraged the kids to participate on his MySpace page. Here are the problems with that: my daughter, 12 at the time, was encouraged to misrepresent herself online, the minimum age for MySpace is 12. That, in addition to the pedifiles who trawl for victims on MySpace and other "community" sites, and Ouija board insurance ads that randomly display there, we decided to no longer attend that church.

New church now.

Recently my wife went to check our pastor's blog at blogger.com. Thinking it would go to another blog entry, she clicked on the "Next Blog>>" link at the top of the page, and was redirected to offensive content. She told the pastor about it, and he implied that doesn't happen with is blog site, and it may have been a pop up ad or spyware.
According to him, this has never happened to anybody visiting his blog. We found about 1 of 5 times the "Next Blog>>" ramdomly forwarded to offensive content. After we documented this and sent it to the pastor, his reply was "I'm not responsible for everything on my site. I am sorry that happened, but I will continue using this blog service."

There was a time when church leaders at least had the appearance of integrity and publicly attempted to disassociate themselves from anything even remotely inappropriate. Now, if it isn't encouraged, it's excused!

You are 100% responsible for your content! If you have a free service, and an ad with a ouija board pops up, or a link from your site forwards to porn, you are the one responsible for selecting that service, therefore making you responsible for the content!

This is a very big issue, and feedback about this is very important.

Here is a link to a pdf document with detailed messages and threads about all of this:

http://seansbasement.homedns.org/~sedwards/content...

cybersean