OK, the trial period failed. Basically because there's only three of us, and we can't keep up with whats going on where and we haven't any intention of trying. We're fed up of trying to mediate between parties when none of them are innocent.
We can't keep up with rewriting rules and writing DD1 entries to a minority of less than 10 people when there are 39 people on the notify list and over 10,000 diarists on the site, most of which we have never heard of because they never cause any trouble.
We can't keep up with people taking the spirit of our acceptable use policy and pulling it to bits to find holes, then using those holes to write about people.
We can't keep up with the circles of people who are this diary and that diary and making comments under this name and that name.
We not only can't keep up, we can't be bothered any more. We deal with DearDiary.Net for one reason, because it was fun. The abuses lately have made it not be fun, and with that in mind we had a meeting the day before (in email) to decide where we were taking it. The options were the same as before (listed here) and we decided that the deletion policy just isn't working.
People can create new diaries faster than we can delete them. The internet being what it is means we can't actually stop anyone using the service. And we'd basically set a challenge for the abusers to see how far they could go.
So what does this all mean?
Basically, as of now, unless you are a lawyer, do not mail our abuse address. It will be ignored. We can't keep up with you anyway. Sort it out amongst yourselves.
I know this decision will offend some people, but we're spending WAY too much time babysitting less than 10 people on this site when we should be concentrating on improving it for the 10,000 people who use it sensibly and play nicely.
The legal rules will still be upheld. You risk prosecution if you write things that are illegal (not from us, but this IS a public forum, remember that when you write). And you potentially risk legal action if you slander people or name them, but thats your problem not ours. Think about what you write before you write it, you could just be opening a can of worms for yourself.
But as of now, we are not getting involved in your fights any longer. Thats all.
To the >10000 diarists, who we've never received any kind of complaint about, please accept our apologies for troubling you and for making it sound like we had a problem with you too. We dont and never did. We also hereby apologise for having lost the motivation and time necessary to improve this site for you. That's about to change, we're reprioritizing....