First post

The concept of a "first post" movement was started by denise years ago while she was heading the LiveJournal Abuse Team. The text of this page, in various formats, has floated around various places on the internet and evaporated as people's hosting situations changed. This wiki page intends to be slightly less ephemeral.

While leaving a first post with emergency information is encouraged by various people who hold official roles with Dreamwidth, the first post movement itself is not official and is entirely up to your personal best discretion.

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First Post, Private, Please

About the Dreamwidth Emergency Contact Information “First Post” Program

The text from this page was adapted from several previous versions.

The First Post Program was originally started by Denise Paolucci, one of the founders of Dreamwidth, many years ago. It provides senior staff of websites such as Dreamwidth the ability to contact you offline in the event of an emergency. There have been, for instance, LiveJournal phone posts interrupted by violence and other such situations reported to the abuse team which they can do nothing about because they can’t find the person in trouble.

Please take a moment of your time to make this post: your privacy will never be violated except in absolute need. Everyone hopes it will never be necessary, of course, but if you do have a problem, it could save the emergency services vital time contacting you.

If you want to take part:

Write an entry with your contact information — at least your full name, address, date of birth, and phone number(s) where you can be contacted. You can also include, if you wish, instant messenger details, email addresses and alternate phone numbers, and contact details of significant other(s) and/or family.

Edit the date of the entry as your birthdate to ensure that it is chronologically the first entry of your journal, and tick the box to tell Dreamwidth not to show the entry on Reading Pages.

Set the security level to “Private” and then post your entry.

Once you have done this, place a comment on your profile such as:

<a href="http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/wiki/index.php/First_post"><strong><em>In an emergency situation, every second counts.</em></strong></a><br>I participate in the Dreamwidth Emergency Contact Information <a href="YOUR FIRST POST ENTRY">First Post</a> program.<br><em>Do you? The life you save may be your own.</em>

Change the text YOUR FIRST POST ENTRY to the permalink for your Emergency Contact entry, which should look something like this:

http://exampleusername.dreamwidth.org/#.html

Replace “exampleusername” with your username, and the # sign with the correct entry ID number, which you can find in your browser’s address bar when you click to the comment page of your entry.