Questions of netiquette

Around fifteen years ago, I used to post in the forums at mrcranky.com a lot.  There was no moderation and I met several interesting people.  There was one who was rather thin-skinned, and eventually he stopped writing posts there, but continued to "lurk," reading other people's posts.  Some people say it's a violation of "netiquette" to keep lurking in a thread that you aren't contributing to.  But speaking for myself, it's no skin off my face if someone reads my posts without posting himself.

On one occasion, however, this ex-poster sent me an email taking issue with something I had posted, leading to a quarrel.  This seems objectionable to me:  someone posting in a thread can only write for the other people posting there.  If you can't reply by posting there, let it ride. (It wasn't like I'd been writing about him.)

A year later, it happened again.  I sent this person an email in an attempt to be friendly with him, and in his reply he attacked me over something I'd written there.  This resulted in another quarrel, and we haven't communicated since.  What particularly bothered me was that a few months before, after an earlier incident, he'd returned to the site and made a rather theatrical promise to stop lurking. (I should have guessed he didn't mean it.) I hate losing friends!

Some years back, I was organizing the Karaoke Meetup in Toronto. (That ended after an event where I thought five people were coming, but I was the only one who showed up.  Those cold January nights will do that!) One person attended an event I hosted, and I seem to have done something rude then.

This person was also a member of a Movie Meetup that I belonged to, and a short while later she posted a message saying that she was going to see a certain movie at the Cinematheque and inviting the other members to join her.  I was going to see this same movie so I sent her a message saying I'd like to see it with her.  She responded that the invitation didn't apply to me because of my "distasteful" behavior at this earlier event.  I replied by asking what I'd done, adding: "I wish I'd been told earlier." Crickets. (That's net slang for "No answer.") I skipped the movie.

So who needs the manners lesson here?  Does she think that if she doesn't tell me what I did, I'll search through the recesses of my memory and manage to figure it out myself?  Alas, all I can do is assume that she's out of her tree and that my behavior was perfectly polite.