This is (probably) unnecessarily long. I apologize. I am not gushing, I am seriously thanking. Please acknowledge our own efforts and our mods' unrelenting commitment by liking this post, even if you don't agree with my message. Thanks in advance.
This is a pretty respectable place. WS is quickly becoming regarded as the go-to place when you need help. LE comes here, families come here, PIs come here, Media comes here, come here, the bad guys come here, and the people who want to help come here. WS crosses many genres, not just the missing. We have so many forums for so many different types of issues. Trials, Missing, Unidentified, Crime in the News, particular cases, etc etc etc.
And here we all are, in here posting our thoughts an ideas about how to find Lucas before we run out of time. We just post and post and post. Puzzle solvers. Working with limited clues and figuring out how to solve a crime. Aren't we amazing? And with an active thread such as this one, there's bound to be some boundaries crossed, mistakes made, feathers ruffled, and information shared that shouldn't be, etc. Think about this. In the last one month, this case alone has now accumulated 12,400+ posts. Just this one case.
Well I want you all to appreciate something. Yesterday it was a lot more than 12,400. Yesterday we taxed the living daylights out of the mods. I am not sure if it was just LilTexans or if the poor dear had some help.... but I think it was just her. She was tasked with cleaning up the thread for us, and modded some number of posts in the range of 700-1000 probably, that we flagged to fix. All in one day. For just this case. It was an evil task that maybe could have been avoided if we had known better. And the best part is it was done with a smile, not one single complaint. I went to bed past midnight last night, flagging the last remnants of the mistake, and I know everything I flagged was taken care of by the time I closed my eyes. I feel really bad for making a person work like that, and I appreciate the passion and commitment to keeping this place solid and on the up and up and a place LE can come to and know they are getting legit help.
At the time of this posting, there are over 30 brains posting in this thread, and another 25 lurking. It's absolutely incredible to consider all of those different mindsets coming together and hashing out ideas that very often turn into clues. Searches are planned based on your banter and clues. Searches are happening on the daily, and we are really getting into the nitty gritty far corners now. We have to keep pushing, coming up with ideas, and looking. We have to get property owners to go out to their culverts and look for unexpected activity. We have to ask around to see if anyone saw headlights in a place they usually aren't, at a time they usually aren't, acting in a way they usually aren't on the evening of Feb 16. We have to get the every-day-person to start looking in corners as they walk by wherever they happen to be. Everyone. Everywhere. Lucas is somewhere. We can not give up. We can't allow a child killer to have access to other children. We must find Lucas, and we can't do it alone.
So, thank you mods and especially LilTexans for your thankless commitment to WS. And to all of our posters here in WS.... I am so proud to be among you. You guys come up with the most incredible thoughts. It's just mind-blowing. :loveyou: