In Park Slope, where strollers rule the sidewalks,
parents have come to depend on an online message board where they can
swap tips on toilet training, the best place to buy rain boots for
toddlers, and how to keep goldfish from dying.

   

But when
a recent question about a preschool prompted a mother and shop owner to
recount a bad business encounter with the school’s director, the
husband of the school’s director threatened to sue the board’s
moderators for defamation.

To 3,000  families  that subscribe to the online board, parkslopeparents

@yahoogroups.com,
this was serious. Some said the threat of a lawsuit endangered their
ability to freely express their (often heated) opinions on anything
from the quality of restaurants to whether parents should give their
nannies drug tests.

Susan Fox founded the message board three
years ago as a new mother looking to make connections with other
neighborhood parents. Occasionally, she said, if a message seems likely
to inflame other members, she or one of five other moderators will send
a private e-mail message suggesting that someone "think before you push
the send button."

As she prepared cheese omelets on Friday
evening for her two daughters, Samantha, 4, and Sabrina, 21 months, Ms.
Fox said she never wanted to censor anybody. "My greatest fear is that
the list mutates into an overly polite, overly P.C. list that does not
speak its mind," she said.

But Ms. Fox and her fellow
moderators found themselves threatened with a lawsuit after Lisa Meyer,
owner of the Painted Pot, a do-it-yourself pottery store, posted a
message last month saying that she sued the preschool, Midwood
Montessori, in small-claims court three years ago over an unpaid $350
bill. Edward B. Safran, a lawyer and the husband of the school’s
director, Harriet Safran, demanded in several e-mail messages that Ms.
Fox remove Ms. Meyer’s post.

Ms. Fox offered to let Ms. Safran
respond to the offending post on the message board. In her rebuttal,
Ms. Safran accused Ms. Meyer of defamation and added that the Painted
Pot had "failed to deliver what was promised." Ms. Safran and Ms. Meyer
agreed in their posts that a judge had ordered the school to pay half
the bill. Ms. Meyer, reached by telephone, declined to comment.

In
subsequent e-mail messages to Ms. Fox, Mr. Safran said that if Ms.
Meyer’s post was not deleted from the message board, he would sue its
moderators, saying they had published libelous content.

Ms. Fox said she did not want to set a precedent allowing anyone who objected to a post to "bully us" into deleting it.

But
as Mr. Safran’s threats of a lawsuit continued, the moderators were
scared into shutting down the message group’s entire archives this
month. The action prompted an outpouring of messages from members, many
of them angry. David Alquist, a father of two teenage daughters,
complained about people who are "trying to intimidate and silence us."
He wrote that he did not know what the matter was about, but added that
"it is too silly for words."

In an interview, Mr. Alquist said he disregarded many of the critical posts on the list.

"It’s
hard to imagine how someone could be truly wronged by a random posting
by a stranger," he said. "Pretty soon we’ll say people aren’t allowed
to talk to each other in the streets. It’s nuts."

But Nancy
Workman, one of the board’s moderators, acknowledged that she had
avoided a local store after reading a negative post. Although she does
not advocate censorship, she said, "we have to be careful both as
people who post messages and as we read messages to be mindful" of the
potential to influence neighbors’ behavior.

Last week, a local
parent helped recruit Christopher Wolf, chairman of the Internet law
group at the law firm Proskauer Rose in Washington, to give pro bono
advice to the Park Slope moderators.

Mr. Wolf said that he had
told the moderators that under federal law they were not liable for Ms.
Meyer’s post and that he had called Mr. Safran to tell him he had no
case.

Mr. Wolf added that under the federal Communications
Decency Act, Internet service providers, Web site operators and
bulletin board hosts were exempted from liability for the statements of
others. People who post libelous statements can be subject to
defamation suits, he said.

Mr. Safran said, "This matter has
been settled," later adding that he did not intend to file a lawsuit
against the moderators. Ms. Fox said the moderators were waiting for
him to sign a letter affirming that.

Ms. Fox said she intended to
reopen the parkslopeparents archives this weekend, with Ms. Meyer’s
post removed. Ms. Fox said she wanted to remind people that they were
responsible for their own posts, although she did not want "to put the
fear of God in anyone."

But she added, "We are happy to get back to talking about how to get a baby to take a bottle."