Originally posted by lolof
I think that a personal apology is so much more difficult to make and so much more honest. When you use a forum to do it, you make it easier for yourself as you may have other friends who like you anyway. A personal apology may not always be accepted.
I disagree.
If I had known Tygert a long time and had come to value our exchanges it would be quite different, but on this site, as you and I are also, we are strangers. As such there is nothing more difficult in a PM under these circumstances than writing what you were going to say in a forum post then firing it off as a private message instead.
Whether or whether not the apology is accepted is moot - indeed Tygert could have easily just ignored this thread and nobody would have thought any worse of him, just as he could do with a PM.
Here I am just doing a courtesy to some young stranger in the world who's every reply to me I would, (and did) shoot down until he admitted a mistake he made early on. A grave error on my part because 14 year olds are less equipped to do this than many adults (who often share the same difficulties).
Indeed the only thing I accomplished in that thread was embarrassing and frustrating the poor kid (which in turn made my job of finding fault in his follow-up posts even easier for me - and to my shame I exploited this), and so having finally realised the gravity of my own error, to make small reparations, he now gets to see me being grilled (by certain posters who also played their own parts) just as he did.