I’m a slow learner and I get easily confused when I try to sort through the feedback. 
On occasion, but probably not for the reasons you think. I don’t ever regret the personal things I’ve posted frankly, although certain people prone to snarking (here and elsewhere) have tried to shame me for that. The small-minded board elitists can sit and spin, as far as I’m concerned.
But yes. I have regretted posting things that legitimately hurt other people.
More or less every weekend, usually between 1 and 3 A.M. Never anything too bad, no public declarations of love to ex-girlfriends on FB, etc. More like taking a double entendre just a little too far, or posting some stupid song lyric or a random thought that seemed especially deep at the time. Enough that the next morning all of my Facebook friends are aware wheresmymind was pretty hammered last night!
It’s not the content I regret posting, but the state of mind I was in when I did it. In the past I had a tendency to post here when I was the most emotionally vulnerable. I guess it would be the message board equivalent of drunk dialing someone. And it almost always made me feel worse.
I also regret the times I have lost my temper with other posters, and insulted them. It’s only happened two or three times before, but it frustrates me, because it’s not really the person I want to be.
about a decade ago in a fit of extremely poor judgment, I posted pics and details about some prototype hardware I was working on at work. I was excited that it was about to run for the first time, and wanted to share that info with friends. Unfortunately, the aspects of the hardware I was discussing were considered proprietary and confidential. Someone who knew the parties involved saw my thread contacted the manufacturer of the hardware, and I soon got a phone call from them suggesting that it might be in my best interests to get that post removed. No sarcasm there, it really was expressed as a concern about me and my intererests, as I probably could have lost my job if I had let that material remain in public view; I will be forever grateful for that call, and for the moderators who graciously agreed to remove my post from public view.
It all ended well, but I regret posting that stuff in the first place; that was just dumb.
Got me pegged on this one!! Seems sooo deep during drinking time, and not so much the next day! Guilty as hell of this one! Good to know I am not alone!! 
I’ve posted a few things that I regret and it always seems to come back to bite me. Maybe thats good for me though; you don’t feel pain if you’re dead and while you are alive you can make the most of the day (and your life).
I’ve had horrible personal failures and traumatic events (to me) that I never should have shared. Even when what I post isn’t in that vein, I’ve often wondered if I was funny enough or witty enough to be posting here.
Perhaps Prof Xavier was wrong…
There was a long, nasty thread here a year or two ago that centered mainly around, IIRC, Mel Gibson, wife beating, and the vicissitudes of child support. I stupidly allowed Diogenes the Cynic and a couple other folks to irritate me in that thread and posted angry; always a mistake. Where they really got to do their happy dance was when I stated that I didn’t have a page at one or another of the social sites and it turned out I still did. I thought I had cancelled it as part of a deliberate effort to reduce my on-line presence a ffew months earlier. Seems it was a multi-click process and I hadn’t completed it, though I thought I had. Missed a confirmatory email, maybe.
I’ve had that thread thrown up to me a couple times since. Oddly enough, it wasn’t by any of the people who were active combatants.
I’ve never regretted anything I’ve posted, only who has read it.
I try really hard to re-read my posts before posting. That said, I have posted a few things here that I should’ve thought harder about prior to hitting the post button. Mostly those were threads or posts where I was hoping to get validation despite not deserving it. Usually if I have a question about my actions, I know that I probably won’t get the answer I want, so I’m better off a) not asking and b) not doing/saying what I’m asking about.
With respect to facebook, I’m very cautious. Since they change the security policies so frequently, there’s no guarantee that something I didn’t want someone to see won’t be viewed. I tend to limit comments to snarky remarks about my kids (what? they’re funny), posting pictures for friends I keep up with and posting updates for those friends whose primary contact with me is via facebook.
I’ve had to pm apologies in the past, so yeah, I regret some of my posts on this board. I’ve learned not post when annoyed and to never, never, never post anything anywhere if I’m annoyed and under the influence. That combination almost got my dumb ass fired.
Back in 1999, after a Friday night party at my house, I decided sending my boss an email explaining why I thought he was a major asshole would be a terrific idea. I was pretty drunk and with righteous rage I let rip in a profane frenzy of insults. He truly was a cretin and I was sick of his childish and offensive political rants. Everyone else at the office avoided topics like religion and politics, but he seemed to feel entitled to rant like Rush Limbaugh on crack. Absolutely confident this needed to be done, I clicked “send” and went to bed.
7 AM, Saturday morning: I bolt upright in bed. Holy fuck! I jump in my car and drive like a maniac to the office. I know my boss liked to go in on the weekends to get away from his family and surf internet porn. Ok, cool, no cars in the lot. Run inside, fire up his computer. Open up his email client and there is my masterpiece. Delete. Delete from deleted items. Delete off email server. Somebody is putting their keys in the door. Shutdown, c’mon fucking computer shut down. Boss walks in, I’m at my desk looking like Jim from Taxi. Tell the boss I’m copying a file to work on at home. Get commended for my work ethic.
I wouldn’t have gotten away with it in 2012. He probably would have read it on his iPhone while eating breakfast.
Both The Flintstones and The Simpsons have had episodes where the main character has written a nasty letter to his boss, dropped it in the mailbox, almost immediately regretted it, tried (unsuccessfully) to get it back out of the mailbox, and had to intercept it before it reached the boss. Your story is a good modern version.
Was that the one where Homer stuck the hose in the mailbox?
I looked through my own old posts and discovered a fair number that I regret. Maybe regret is too strong a word, but just stuff where I should have thought it over more. For instance, I’ve asked questions that could have been easily Googled and started poorly thought-out OPs. I don’t drink much anymore but jeez, just a couple glasses of wine and the stupiid flows from my fingertips through the keyboard to the world.
I have not yet posted anything here that I regretted, but I am fairly careful of what and how I say on this board. Y’all seem like such a well-adjusted group of intelligent people (at least in comparison with every other online group I have encountered) and I don’t wish to be categorized as a blackguard or a ruffian.
Maybe that is why I rarely get anyone to comment upon my post’s contents.
Perhaps I am too ‘Caspar Milquetoast’ in my online persona.
For the record, in meat-space I am significantly different than I present myself here.
Less circumspect and much more off-the-cuff. But, my friends don’t carry around recorders to instantly and permanently archive my every utterance, so I suppose that changes the dynamic quite a bit.
Many many times.
Doing a little bit of self analysis lately, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m often arrogant, unsympathetic, argumentative, aggressive and opiniated.
And thats when I’m sober.
I’m working on it, I don’t like it and am not proud of it.
I think I’m going to regret taking on a mom in a discussion about breasfeeding.
Oh, yeah, that reminds me. I posted an angry rant at Der Trihs in a Great Debates yet another rape thread. It probably came out of nowhere, but I was still pissed off about something that he posted in another thread. Then I went away because I realized I was being crazy. But anyways, Sorry, Der Trihs.
I posted about an acquaintance using their real, full name many years ago, figuring it would never come to their attention because the boards weren’t indexed by search engines. Some years later, the boards opened up to Google, and some years after that someone else found my post and took offence.
I often wonder what else I’ve forgotten about posting back when I was confident no one from “outside” the boards would ever stumble across it.
As many others have noted, when sober no, when drunk yes.
Alas, I really like to unwind by having a few glasses of wine while surfing the net, and the Dope.
:smack:
Nope, never, no sirree.