Devil’s advocate: People don’t feel like they can talk about their feelings of suicide because it is taboo. I know I felt that way in the past. I just kept it to myself and rode the wave to the other side. It sucked. But, I rode the wave to the other side. I now know I’ll get to that other side if I ever have the thoughts again. Most people feeling it for the first time have no hope of getting to the other side of the horribleness.

Sorry to go deeeeep in your comments. (And, please don’t worry about me. I am way far away in years and in mindset from the time when I felt this way.)

Joefish, I’ve not been involved at all with those aspects of development, so all I can say from experience is my life is so much better with WordPress and Akismet than without them, and I’d harken to guess multitudes feel the same way. Gravatar is awesome also, so my logic is limited to “wordpress = good; akismet = good, so gravatar, run by the same people who did the first two things = probably good”. While I highly prefer a “Kingdom” vs a “dictatorship”, I don’t believe repression exists when membership is voluntary.

Poppy, thank you. I know of several people taking it harder than I because as I said, he was just an acquaintance – and a minor one at that. And it raises the easier-to-avoid-for-me internal debate of whether or not our taboo about suicide is helpful or harmful. I lean to the ‘helpful’ side because I think if it was “no big deal” more people would choose it. I think it’s the fact that it’s so bad that we ‘save’ so many people from it.

Absurdist, Yes, I definitely realize you have few grammar mistakes. The ones I do are typically typos from being impatient or bait that I unintentionally leave out for others to find.

Avitable, I call “typo negative” — it was a pun on words. I just didn’t realize it until you pointed it out, so it’s a retroactive typo negative.

Chelle, check out my blog to see a huge typo on Wayne’s part.

I’ve tried to submit bug reports for an issue with Akismet, but each time I’ve been rebuffed. And usually somewhat rudely. This particular bug still remains unaddressed.

And the people at Automattic are mostly the same people who form the core development team for WordPress. Some of the decisions they make are completely mystifying. At least once, a change that set back the WP community and had a directly negative impact on the average user was made by Matt, without any discussion, for what was apparently personal reasons.

I’m concerned that Gravatar will become yet another vanity project for King Matt.