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Aug. 10, 2000

To Joanne and Zep.....

Big hugs and thanks for being brave enough to attempt the undertaking you have....for without your determination and zeal in helping others this community would never have gotten off the ground.

Me, old grumpy, well on January 3, 2000, after smoking for 41 years and a few half hearted attempts to quit during that time, my husband and I decided that it was do or die time for us.....In our late 50's, we realized that time was flying faster than the speed of sound and we did not have many more opportunities to quit before our health was in serious jeopardy....unbeknost to us....changes were taking place in our bodies. They were caught just in time, I hope.

I spent my first five weeks of my quit at another quit smoking site and while it saved my life and got me to see that I could not only quit, but really and truly enjoy it, I did not care for the way that it was run. Too many threads on silly topics unrelated to smoking, and to many failed attempts where people did not really take quitting seriously, brought me to Freedom. Sat here reading for a couple of weeks until Joanne coaxed me out of hiding....somewhat like she has done to other members here. The rest is history. Once I started talking, they could not shut me up!

In 1963, I graduated from Ohio State University Dental School with a degree in dental hygiene. Stopped to raise my family and worked only one day a week for a couple of years. Have a son and two daughters....all have degrees in different fields....son is a chemical engineer for Eli Lily Pharmaceutical and heads their production safety, older daughter is a social worker and works with abused children and my baby, Susie, has her degree in Criminology and is a police officer for a large suburb of Cleveland. After a year and a half, she has just been promoted to investigator and recieved a gold badge......she is working undercover and loves it. Going back to school at night to get Law degree or Biology degree for forensics. Have four beautiful granddaughters....all out of town.

I live in a suburb of Cleveland where I manage a CVS pharmacy in one suburb, and my husband of 36 years is a pharmacist, for Rite Aid in another.

Both here and at work, I enjoy interacting with people. I am, and always have been a people person. And in both places I tend to do a lot of mothering....even when I get angry at work.....they say ok, mom.....and smile. If I get angry, and I have here, it is only because I care. I care for each and every one of you just like I care for my customers and staff at work. When I chastise, and I try not to, there is a twinkle in my eye.....cannot stay angry long and cannot stand to see someone here suffering. It tears my heart apart.

Online support has saved my life and to give to others what has been given to me....the gift of life....is why I continue to stay here.

On another note.....My husband, Hal and I have had the honor and privelege of meeting Joanne and Joel last May in Chicago and also got to attend Joel's seminar. They are everything you see here on the board....since, warm, loving and caring...with a strong desire to see each and every member here at Freedom break away from a terrible addiction. We had such a great time, in fact...that SillyOldMrS and I are looking forward to visiting with them again in 4 weeks.

To all our old members and to all our newest members....may your lives be healthy, happy, and smokefree.

hugs to all,

Linda........Seven months, six days, 9 hours, 19 minutes and 21 seconds. 4387 cigarettes not smoked, saving $750.17. Life saved: 2 weeks, 1 day, 5 hours, 35 minutes.

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Aug. 10, 2000

Well geesh! What can I say after all that...Zep did all the explaining (thank God) and Linda even posted my picture. (what would I do without you Linda) ; )) So now what?

I am sitting here thinking how fast time goes by, is this place really about to hit its one year milestone...wowsers. : ) As Zep mentioned our quits started off at another support board. I remained active there for quite some time (until Freedom became too busy)...I really enjoyed helping others...made some awesome friends there too. Zep and I were the class clowns...we humored our way through our addiction..we had a graphic for every situation at that board....we really had some fun..we even hosted Friday evening milestone parties. lol

Then on September 8th, 1999 Zep sent me an email with Freedom's URL.. I wasn't too impressed when I came here (lol)...looked pretty interesting but we didn't have members......posting to ourselves seemed a bit futile (hehehe)...I told him I would give it a try for a few weeks. We played with graphics set up guidelines...changed forum structure and learned some HTML......as Zep mentioned, I embarrassed him and did some PR work in internet chat rooms...he wasn't kidding..I really went looking for people and they LISTENED..THEY CAME : ))

I sat in those chat rooms bragging stats...telling them all about online support and what a wonderful roll it played in my quit. It was slow going but even with the few members we had it was very rewarding. Then less than a month into Freedom's existence on October 5, 1999 my quit was tested to the max, the unimaginable happened...I received a phone call ...my loving brother had been robbed on his way home from work...he was shot to pieces. I ran to the rescue of his family..walked into my brother's house to face his sobbing wife, five children and my 83 year old father who lived with them. I didn't know who to help first...I could hardly stand on my own feet. On the kitchen table was my brothers opened carton of cigarettes...I took some glances and shook like crazy. Within moments the house began to fill with friends and family who received the horrible news as well...even people who didn't smoke were smoking......

Talk about online support dear friends, I received flowers..cards..letters and phone calls from around the world...really amazing.

I thank God that I only settled for that glance that night...never even touched one cigarette. Until this day I truly believe my brother sent me graces from heaven...(I was always bugging him to quit smoking)

Those graces keep coming .....thank you Zep for inviting me to come work with you and for explaining today the wonderful values of this great forum...for the endless hours you spend making sure we stay safe and sound from a very scary addiction....thank you Joel for your priceless wisdom.....thank you Freedom.

Smoking is history for me now ...no craves at all.... but never shall I become complacent as I will always be an addict and remain one puff away from a full blown relapse.

We just cannot learn enough about our addiction...we need to be aggressive folks...our lives are precious. Stick with it dear friends...LETS NEVER TAKE ANOTHER PUFF! : )))

With love and gratitude...

Your quit sis - Joanne ; ))

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Aug. 12, 2000

Wow, I am glad to see the whole history written out so clearly. Sorry I was gone the days it was buzzing. For my background I am attaching my personal home page here. I noticed the links to my library seem to be down. On the bottom of my homepage is an alternate link to the library, under the button labeled reinforcement materials. I hope this fills in any blanks of information, although I think Zep did a good job at capturing our history and more important our present and future goals.

Hang in there everyone. The way to do it is simple...Never Take Another Puff! Joel

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Jan 06, 2001

Since we have so many new members over the past week, thought I would bring this up to give some background to who we all are and how we got to where we are today. As you have seen, Freedom evolved over time. As we got more and more experience, we started to get a better sense of how to help people in a virtual world. We had a few growth spurts with growing pains.

First when we went to an exclusive cold turkey site, then when we went to a private site where membership applications were required. Both moves caused many people to at first be angered because we were trying to set up a more exclusive membership. But we were not trying to be elitists, looking for richer, stronger, smarter, better, or not even nicer people. We were not trying to set up a site that was even appealing to one country or continent.

We were trying to establish a site that disseminated real concrete quit information and support that we saw from ongoing experience was working to help more people quit. Not necessary the largest number of people, there are bigger sites with more people. But we were trying to set up a site that had a higher percentage of people who joined actually succeed. We wanted the absolute maximum percentage of people to succeed at quitting as possible. We truly see this as a fight for health and a fight for very life.

There are two aspects of our site that we believe help us accomplish this goal. First, the cold turkey methodology, which minimizes the time period that people experience physiological withdrawal. While mass media advertising makes it look like other methods are superior, if one looks in their real world of family, friends, coworkers and acquaintances they will almost always find that the long-term quitters (one year plus) they encountered through their lives the vast majority of the times had quit cold turkey.

The second factor that makes us unique and controversial in many circles is our relapse prevention policy. The one that Zep labeled as tough love policy in an earlier post today. Most professional literature ever produced on smoking cessation has advice in it with a variation of the statement, "Don't let a slip put you back to smoking." We feel that comment makes as much sense as telling an alcoholic not to let a drink put you back to drinking," or a heroin addict, "don't let a little injection put you back to using," or for a more graphic depiction, "don't let unprotected sex with a HIV infected individual or a person with other kinds of sexually transmitted disease let you get pregnant or infected."

These messages are ridiculous. The message should not be don't let these transgressions follow their natural tendency to result in major consequences, the message needs to be don't allow yourself to do these things because natural consequences are likely going to happen. In other words instead of saying "don't let a slip put you back to using," the message needs to be, "DON'T SLIP!" There is no slipping, or cheating, or just, or puff, or accident, or mistake. These words need to be thrown out of your vocabulary when used in conjunction toward smoking or any drug addiction. They all mean RELAPSE!

While the above paragraph may anger many, we believe that it is the real make or break point of understanding that is going to make this quit the last quit any of you will ever have to experience. It all translates to what runs through every piece of material I have produced in the last 30 years of working with people quitting. First in face to face live encounters, and now in the virtual world setting here at Freedom. If you want to quit smoking and stay nicotine free over the duration of your life, always remember to never take another puff!

Joel

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Aug 03, 2001

Today is an anniversary of one of our red letter days at Freedom. One year ago today MSN put Freedom up on their homepage. I think our membership doubled in one day, I don't remember for sure but I think about 600 people joined up in one day. It was pandemonium around here. We were an open board then, any one could come in, say what they like, and give any advice, good or bad. While we had a few of these people succeed, it was actually only a handful. There was so much clutter and distractions happening at the board we feel we missed a major opportunity with hundreds of people. This day more than any other taught us the importance of getting our board focused. We know that we may only get a few seconds with a given individual to reach them with who we are and what we are trying to accomplish at Freedom.

Many of our diversion policies and many of our principles in our mission statement were born from that one-day experience. That day was exhausting to our managers, we all tried to come in throughout the day and keep strong educational message coming to the top but we were overwhelmed, no matter how hard we tried we could not keep up with the influx.

The only day that was even close to this was January 3, when MSN did it again, but this time we were more ready. We made it where only members could post. We were still overwhelmed as management, over 1,000 people applied for membership in just a couple of days, but that was just an administrative nightmare, the board stayed uncluttered and people who came here to read got quality information, even if they could not post--they could still learn.

So today is an anniversary of one of those days of how we got to be who we are today. We are glad you are all here with us and hope you find our board providing you with the tools you need to be able to get on with your life as a successful ex-smoker. We have only one mission now that we put all of our focus into, and that is to make sure that each and every one of our members know that they will always stay successful as long as they never take another puff!

Joel

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Jun 23, 2009

Freedom will be moving to a new home! You may have already read news that MSN is closing down MSN Groups in February 2009. If so, please don't panic. Everything will be fine. We are now in the process of investigating our options. We will do all we can to make the move as easy as possible. As you may know, New Years is our busiest time of the year. Our goal is to have Freedom's move complete by then.

Our primary concern right now is finding a way to migrate Freedom's more than 359,000 archived member posts to a new home. While MSN is providing the ability to move (migrate) MSN Group threads and posts to a new host website that it has chosen, we are hoping to locate a message board hosting platform that offers features and functions closer to those provided here at MSN Groups.

We would love to hear from you if you have the knowledge and skills necessary to migrate message threads between differently formatted message board platforms. Also, drop us a line if you know of a message board hosting platform or site that you think fits nicely with Freedom's needs. We'll see it gets considered.

We'll keep you posted on developments. Our deep and sincere thanks to MSN for giving us a free home since September 1999. Thank you! Still just one rule ... no nicotine today!

Freedom's Management Team

Well, as MSN's closing date neared we settled on a new host, Yuku, and began building "Freedom from Nicotine." At Yuku we could control advertising to a major degree (by buying it off) but lost our "All Topics" board which allowed members to follow all activity on all 22 message boards by looking at a single board. Migration of 346,941 old MSN posts to Yuku appeared to be an impossible task and it was. But Yuku was the best migration offered by any host. Sadly a number of our old MSN boards had grown so large that some were simply too big, old and tangled to capture. This Yuku support message board thread documents our frustrations and stuggle to move threads here to our new home before MSN pulled the plug.

Prior to MSN's Feburary 2009 shutdown we worked hard replacing as many images in migrated threads as time permitted. Once MSN pulled the plug all old MSN based images disappeared and links within migrated threads no longer functioned. Frankly, we will spend the next year or so repairing as many threads as time permits. In most cases we have no way of knowing what image went with what post, so we simply delete old HTML image box codes but in some cases we do!

Our thinking with the new site was to broaden focus to Freedom from all forms of nicotine delivery, not just smoking or tobacco. With scores of new nicotine products hitting the streets, if we follow the nicotine we'll continue hitting the problem head-on.

We thank each of you for your patience and cooperation this past half year. We know the site isn't yet as user friendly as our old home but continue working to make it so. All suggestions are truly appreciated. If you are an old still nicotine-free member from MSN who has not yet joined us here we'd love to have you!!! Oh, at the top of our main page is a link entitled This link allows you to view all new messages posted during the past 24 hours . It's a search work-around that does a fair job at imitating our old "All Topics" message board as it shows all recent posts to all boards.

Whether here or there, there was always only one rule ... no nicotine today!

Breathe deep, hug hard, live long,

John (Gold x10)

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