Important Announcement - Please Read.

It is with great sadness that we write this post.

In every community, even a great one such as The Mudflats, filled with many wonderful, compassionate and generous people, there can be bad apples.

We have recently banned a member from the forums. Normally we would not write a post about this, but on this occasion we feel it is necessary to give an explanation to forum members due to the fact that we are putting some new rules into place as a result of this banning.

After participating in a live chat while traveling in early September, Mudflats member Samper borrowed $700 USD from fellow mudpups when she was supposedly stranded in Greece and unable to pay her hotel bill. She promised to pay the money back as soon as she arrived home.

As yet no payment has been received by the people who loaned the money. Samper has made plenty of excuses. When the people involved began to request payment politely, she responded with abuse and nastiness.

The Mod/Admin team has been made aware of the situation within the last 48 hours. We have received copies of all the emails between the parties. One of our Administrators contacted Samper to request that payment be made immediately and received combative and abusive emails in response.

During this time, the forum team began to investigate further. We found out that Samper claims elsewhere to be very well travelled, and instead of this being the trip of a lifetime as she claimed on the Mudflats, she claimed elsewhere to have been travelling to Greece in September of 2008 and August of 2006, she had recently been to Rome, and she has been on several cruises.

We found many posts where she lectured members of travel forums on travel etiquette and how to be financially prepared with a mixture of cash and credit cards. Those posts are startling contrasts to her September appearance in live chat, panicked and crying.

As we checked her comments on the blog, statements made in the forum chat and her posts here against the information we found elsewhere, we discovered that many of the things she said seemed to be contradictory. It is our belief that lies have been told.

It was at this time that the difficult decision was made to ban Samper from the forums. A decision like this is never made lightly, so the Admin team hopes you will understand that we feel we had excellent reasons to ban her.

We are quite disturbed that our forum chat area, which is something we installed to enable mudpups to connect and chat and enjoy each other's company, became a place for someone to solicit funds. At this point, it may be that the chat was used for dishonest and unethical financial gain, although we still hope that the mudpups will receive their money back.

We request that if anyone is contacted by Samper via email, please immediately forward that email on to us at unlocktroll at gmail dot com.

AKMuckraker and the Mudflats Forum staff are very proud that Mudpuppies have come together on the Forum and blog to create a compassionate and caring online community. Samper not only harmed the Mudpuppies who lent her money (not one penny of which has been returned at this time), but also violated the trust of the entire Mudflats community.

As a result of this event, we feel the need to put some rules into place both here on the forums, in the chat and on the blog. The new rules appear here.

The new rules are not intended to prevent or interfere with personal friendships and kindness that form outside of the forum. Rather, they are to prevent the forum from being used to harm any of its members.

If you have any questions -

Please click here to contact the admins via private message.

Alternatively, you can email us at unlocktroll at gmail dot com.

We understand that this message will come as a shock to all of you and that you may feel the need to discuss it with fellow mudpups, but we would request that you do not post about it on the forums or in the blog comment area.

The best location for any discussion would be via private message or in the chat room - we will try to have forum staff in there this evening from 6pm EST onwards.

Thank you for taking the time to read this message,
ForumAdministrator
On behalf of the Admin team.