Posting a Note to ASH

Some ashers may be interested to notify ash when they have exited. This is especially true for regulars who may missed once they suddenly disappear leaving everybody wondering about their whereabouts. However, it has happened more than once that an asher has been "saved" after they posted a note that made it sound like they really planned to kill themselves. The police, college administrators or mental health services may get involved. Furthermore, remember that everything posted to Usenet is public. So if you survive, or you decide against it, you will have a public suicide note in the world's permanent record. It could be pretty embarrassing.

If you still want to post your last note to ash, there are several safer ways for doing this. Probably the best way is to email an ash regular you know, send them the note with instructions on how and when to check whether your exit was a success. The note will be posted only after your exit. The disadvantage is that you have to bother somebody else.

There are some more technical ways to post a note with relative safety which do not require another person. One solution is to post anonymously. What is meant here is real anonymity, such that even the administrators of the anonymity service cannot know who you are. For example, services who provide web based email do not provide enough anonymity since the administrators can find out who you really are. If they are notified that one of their users is about to commit suicide they might take preventive action.

Of course, if you have posted to ash under your real identity in the past, and want the note to be recognized as that same identity then posting the note anonymously will not help much since people who consistently read the group will be able to track your real address down from past posts.

A different technical solution is to use some method for delayed posting. It is possible to set things up such that a message will be sent from your computer only after some period of time. AOL supports delayed posting. In Unix you can use the "at" command. One can prepare a delayed post, attempt to exit, and if it was not successful, stop the command before it is executed so the note will not be sent.

However, there are two risks here. First you will not be able to verify your note was really sent and no malfunction occured. On the other hand there is also the danger (if you are not technically proficient) to "misfire" and post ahead of time.

As a last resort, if you do not want to deal with such complex methods for posting, you can post a note to ash, and exit immediately after this, in order to minimize the chances of intervention.