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a healthy church...transformingLIFE

Tasmanian Anglican

March 2003

 

 

 

 

 

Double Click

by Andrew Lang

 

 

Petitions and the Internet

As you use the Internet and email, sooner or later you will receive a request to sign a petition and to forward this on to other folks. When you reach a certain number of signatures, you are asked to forward it to a particular email address. The issue raised will be one that is important, often vital, but no matter how important it is, do not forward the mail on.

There are two problems with email petitions.

Firstly, they are lists of unverifiable names. Each time one is sent, names preceding yours will be repeated and if each person sends the petition to only two other people, by the time you reach 100, there will be 1,267,650,600,228,229,000,000,000,000,000 petitions circulating (2100) and each name would be repeated on average 1,125,899,906,842,624 times. This makes it invalid and impossible to validate!

Secondly, the impact of this number of emails reaching one site will shut down the address and the server, as well as slowing the whole Internet. This is not considered polite in the online world.

There is a perfectly acceptable way to voice your opinion. You can sign internet petitions where you go to a particular site and fill in your details.