Randolph Carney could see it coming.
In recent months, Carney said, many comments on Lancaster Newspapers' TalkBack forum had degenerated into personal attacks.
Carney, who frequently posted his own views on the online forum as "Artie See," said the hateful speech and racist views of other posters become "more and more difficult to deal with."
"I've warned some of the other posters on many different occasions that they've got to tone this down, and everyone kept saying it's free speech, free speech, free speech," he said.
Now, Carney and the nearly 1,000 other registered users of TalkBack on the LancasterOnline.com website have lost the outlet that, for 10 years, spread their speech, free or otherwise.
Lancaster Newspapers Inc. Thursday morning pulled the plug on TalkBack in the wake of mounting complaints about the lack of civility on the forum.
"The blatant misuse of TalkBack continues and can no longer be tolerated," Lancaster Newspaper president and chief executive Harold E. Miller Jr. said in a prepared statement announcing the decision.
Miller acknowledged that thousands of "well-meaning TalkBack readers and posters will be disappointed by this action" but said the "upsetting, abusive, hateful comments" that ended up on the site were too much to bear.
"It's been abused. It's gone," he said. "Whether it ever comes back again, we'll look and see."
Miller said the decision was not in reaction to recent public criticism of TalkBack by School District of Lancaster board member Charlie Crystle.
Crystle complained at the school board's April 20 meeting that TalkBack enables anonymous users to post racist comments about Hispanics, blacks and other minorities.
Such views can be hurtful to SDL students, he said.
Crystle urged the newspaper to better monitor TalkBack posts, stop linking user comments to online stories and/or require that posters use their own names to identify themselves.
Despite his complaints, Crystle said he was shocked that Lancaster Newspapers, which publishes the Intelligencer Journal/Lancaster New Era and the Sunday News, had killed TalkBack.
"It seems like an overreaction," he said.
"Only some of the comments were nasty, and there's a vibrant community (of posters) there. It feels like they threw the baby out with the bath water."
Crystle added, however, that "no TalkBack is better than TalkBack with racist comments."
TalkBack user Kathleen Harrison said she, too, was shocked to learn the forum had been killed.
"Wow! That really is a shame," said Harrison, who has posted since 2002 as "Kate."
"I'm going to miss my TalkBack."
Harrison said she's "met so many wonderful" people through the forum and participated in TalkBack get-togethers with other posters.
"It's the individuals who don't respect other people who ruin it for all of us," she said. "It's a big loss."
TalkBack users were supposed to adhere to rules that barred posting "any material which is knowingly false and/or defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening or invasive of a person's privacy."
Lancaster Newspapers did not screen or edit TalkBack comments but would remove those posts that other users found to be offensive or false.
The newspaper several times upgraded its software systems to make it easier for users to flag offensive posts, Miller said, but the company lacked the personnel to devote to reading every message.
And if Lancaster Newspapers were to begin screening or editing posts on the site, he said, it would become liable for everything on TalkBack — a position it did not want to take.
The forum served a valuable function by "extending the journalism value of our coverage to get people in the community involved in what we were saying," Miller said.
While it had only 982 registered users, TalkBack got thousands of hits each day, racking up more than 4 million page views per year.
Despite the website traffic it generated, TalkBack's negative comments were too harmful for lancasteronline.com and Lancaster Newspapers to continue the forum, Miller said.
"We wanted to do this as an extension of journalism, but we can't find a reasonable balance where we can control this thing … and our image won't be tarnished," he said.
"We didn't have everybody exercising the good judgment that's required to make this be healthy and productive and something I think the community could look to as an attribute."
Carney said he's disappointed that a forum that inspired him to become more politically active is gone.
But he's not surprised the newspaper company killed it.
"TalkBack wasn't what it used to be," said Carney, who had posted as "Artie See" since 2004.
"When I first got involved, we talked about issues — yes, we argued about issues — but they were issues," he said.
"It's been only the past few months that (posts) have gotten really personal. I've been discouraged by this intolerant attitude."
Carney said the change in tone — from respectful debate to derision and name-calling — seems to be a sign of the times.
"Maybe this parallels what's been happening in our country over the last few years," he said.
"There's less and less constructive dialogue and more divisiveness, and that's a shame."