Stalking a forum member in another venue and/or contacting your work place would, in my mind, be beyond the pale. With any proof of that kind of behavior, the offending member should receive an immediate and permanent ban.
Lou Figueroa
I agree, but there's a gotcha -- what constitutes "proof"? Copy/pastes of text from Facebook is unreliable, because you can type in anything you want. Screenshots are also unreliable, because some folks are extremely good with image editors, and those can be modified.
(Especially if you're trying to show the text that someone typed in e.g. a Facebook PM. While the fonts offered in an image editor are slightly different than the fonts in the screenshot [and their slight difference can be seen with a sharp eye], someone who's real good with cropping and re-pasting small pieces of the image can "copy/paste" the fonts from elsewhere in that screenshot, assemble the words in much the same way as assembling a threat letter with words from newspaper cutouts, and unless they do a terrible job matching the background behind the letters, you won't be able to see that the image was manipulated.)
I offer this, because "proof" is kind of a moving target with some of the editing tools available today, where all of it can be forged, and it takes a very trained eye (and skills to analyze the binary code). I work in the information security field, and although I can't talk about most of the stuff I've worked on, I can share with you that some of it will really make your head spin, at the ends people will go to to try to incriminate someone else, or redirect the audit trail onto someone else.
Putting that aside for the moment, I would say that once a spat has broken out in one forum between two parties, any efforts by one party to communicate in a
negative way to the other party using means outside of the original forum, constitutes harassment. The only difference might be if that one party is trying to smooth things over with the other party, and is using the other means / outside communication as a way of getting away from the original [negative] forum. But if the second party is not receptive to the first party's offers of an olive branch, we're back at square one, where the second party may now try to prove that the first party is trying to harass (and using all the text-/image-editing means at his/her disposal). In other words, "you can't win for losing."
-Sean
