On the other hand, I find myself cringing all too often as the faceless communication allows people to be more rude and insensitive than they would ever be in person.

The other negative aspect is that people tend to believe what they read in these forums, and that is troubling. It seems the amount of misinformation often exceeds the valuable information that can be provided in these formats.

That's why I was not surprised when the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) shut down the wildly popular forum pages on its homesite - www.wildlife.utah.gov - last week.

DWR director Jim Karpowitz told me the decision to close the forums was not taken lightly and not the result of one particular issue.

"We watched it carefully for two years. When I can't sleep, I get up and read the forums. My main concern was inappropriate content for a state-sponsored Web site," he said.

Criticism of the state wildlife agency was a popular tone in the forums, and volunteer moderators of the site say the DWR received complaints from prominent individuals who were taken to task by people in some of the posts.

The decision to pull the forums was made difficult for DWR officials because they account for the vast majority of visits to the site. Karpowitz said there will be a revised format for public comments on the site in the future.

The volunteer moderators did not want to wait for edited and state-controlled content. They prefer open discussion, even if it does get heated at times, and have revised the forums in a similar format at a new site - utahwildlife.net - with no ties to the state.

"We hope a lot of the people from the forums will find their way to our site so we can continue where we left off," said Rod Ashby, who served as a volunteer monitor on the DWR's site and helped create the new forums. "A lot of good things come from the forums. We had a lot of ethical debates about how to handle certain situations. And, personally, I got to meet a lot of people I probably never would have met if it wasn't for the forums."

There are many anglers and hunters on forum pages who have met each other for fishing or hunting trips, and probably a few marriages came as a result of these chat rooms.

Ashby said he is working with the DWR to access the years of archived forums from the state Web site. Those will be posted at the new site once they are obtained.

"We will try to maintain the same atmosphere of promoting the ethics of hunting and fishing and the sharing of ideas," Ashby said.

brettp@sltrib.com