Common Sense: DON'T POST YOUR PARTY ONLINE!!

A reminder about the dangers of posting party invitations on myspace and other forums

Be warned that the link below has some inappropriate pictures. These are party invitations posted on myspace in a high school forum.

Party Invite Link

Hello, wonderful allpoetry members.

If you're not acquainted with me, my name is Zach, and I'm a sixteen year old from Whittier, California. That's all I'm going to tell you about me. No address, no phone number. No address to my school, and I'm certainly not going to offer that we meet. Why?

It's called internet safety, folks.

Many of you are planning to leave this page now, simply because I'm talking about a topic that has been cover *so* many times. Well, I'd advise that you don't do that. Simply because it *needs* to keep being covered, until people learn.

Take the link that I posted above. A student from my school posted that in our myspace forum, advertising several parties. Frankly, I don't know where to start with this, with all the references to 'open bars' and 'girls in skirts' getting in less.... and I was certainly appalled with the one that said at the bottom in huge letters 'get your sex on'. But that's not the point of this post.

Tell me, what happens when a predator, or some crazy son-of-a-gun reads this thread, and finds out where all these intoxicated minors are... most of the time, nothing, but there's always that chance, ALWAYS, that something could happen. As a student journalist, I've had to cover a lot of things that I haven't liked, but if the story came in saying that a student was killed, or raped, or assaulted, or in a coma on life support, because of something that happened at a party like this, I would have NO SYMPATY whatsoever.

It is stupid to post something like this in a public forum. So many things can happen. Frankly, I have half a mind to forward this thread to the LAPD so they can make sure nothing happens (the kids already hate me enough).

We can't stop kids from throwing parties like this... we can't stop them from drinking, smoking, doing drugs, and having sex. But we need regulation on each individual site that has capabilities for reaching a large amount of people, regarding the posting of party invitations. Too many times before, people have suffered because of predators who spend all day searching for parties in order to have some fun for themselves.

If you are inviting people to a party, on myspace for example, do not post a thread in the forums, where ANYBODY can read it. Send individual invitations to people that you think would be interested. (you wouldn't want somebody like me to show up, for instance, who would probably bring some LAPD with him.).

Just be intelligent, people... just think... I don't want to hear about your party on the news; about how 55 teenagers were killed because somebody posted an invitation on myspace or another forum.