Firstly I must just say all the team at Service Dealer send their sympathies to Christine Hart and the team at Mower & Saw Services.

The story last week that the Colchester dealership had suffered a theft followed by a devastating arson attack was truly shocking. Difficult to imagine what an awful blow to such hard work that must be.

This week Christine felt she was able to share some pictures of the effects of the attack with Service Dealer in order to act as a kind of warning to the rest of the industry. I guess the message is that we all must remain highly vigilant at all times - even more so following something which is already distressing enough like a theft. 

The risk with showing pictures such as these is that it could be misconstrued as gawping at someone else's misfortune - like people slowing down to look at an accident on the other side of the motorway. The intention here though is very much to act as a shocking illustration of what can happen to anybody and to therefore raise awareness. The use of the pictures is coming from a good place.

Which is something that cannot be said about one of the comments which was left under the article on last week's newsletter. Of course every other single comment was expressing sympathy and outrage - but as with any online, social media I guess, there has to be one.

I won't link to the comment, or mention names, but someone thought it was appropriate to leave a sarcastic, point-scoring message directed at a manufacturer under the story of a dealer's livelihood being destroyed. I suppose by even mentioning it here I am giving it more attention than it deserves . . 

However, this is indicative of a larger problem with online discourse where seemingly some people fail to realise there is another human at the other end of a computer reading their comments. If you wouldn't say it to someone's face, don't write it, should surely be the rule of thumb?

To be honest we do have the ability to delete any comments we deem offensive or libellous, or indeed we can remove the comment function entirely. With this particular instance though we felt the comment was so off the mark the person was condemning themselves with it. And we don't want to remove the ability to comment completely as we feel it's a valuable resource for debate and can hopefully engender a sense of community.

So please, be nice to each other - the vast majority are!