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Mark Hill: 'It made sense to settle.'

Kevin Vice, a Dallas attorney representing the site, said the shutdown occurred because the site operators "were trying to comply with the restraining order." The posts from Fix and Wolf, he said, were immediately removed from the bulletin board, and both men were blocked from making further contributions.

However long it was gone, Vice, Jones, and attorneys involved in the class action lawsuit all say they believe that the lawsuit had less to do with comments by Shackmaster and Royalwolf than it did with the site's producing more defendants in the class action lawsuit against the company.

"When the law firm started posting information on the web site is when this attack was made," Vice says. "That's really the purpose of it -- to get class action advertisements off the bulletin board.''

Ryan Stephan, one of the Chicago attorneys representing former managers in their overtime complaints, said he also believes "their real intention is to deny people their free speech. We think that this is their attempt to silence these employees."

Added Jones: "Message boards are numerous throughout the worldwide web, and RadioShack is a topic of conversation on many of them. Why do you suppose they are only naming our message board in their lawsuit?"

He said he helped California and Illinois law firms "find potential opt-in participants for these lawsuits through the use of our message board as well as through posting of links for additional information. We are the place where former RadioShack managers are most likely to visit, which doesn't speak very highly of RadioShack's employer/employee relationships."

Vice also said that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 blocked lawsuits against message-board operators based on comments posted by third parties with the declaration that "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

Charles Hodges, senior manager of media relations for RadioShack, said he does not believe there is any connection between the class action and "sucks" lawsuits. "[There were] other reasons why that action was filed against RadioShackSucks other than the overtime lawsuit," he said. "If that's someone's speculation about our motivation, I think they are off base.

"We understand that there are obviously differing points of view on any issue," he said. "In this case we felt they took some specific content too far."

The restraining order against RadioShackSucks barring defamatory posting on the site expired July 13. The judge refused a request to enter a more permanent extension of his temporary order against the site and scheduled a hearing on the case for Aug. 25. In the meantime, RadioShack has provided the attorneys suing it with the names of 7,600 past or present managers who might possibly join the class action lawsuit. Letters to those managers informing them of the lawsuit were put in the mail earlier this month.

Len Roberts joined RadioShack in 1993 -- about a year after Kujak started working for the company. Roberts' talk about RadioShack being a caring place to work left Kujak with a feeling that someone at the top of the company truly cared about the people at the bottom who were putting in the long hours over holidays and weekends.

"I felt sure when Len Roberts came in it would turn around. He was going to make a lot of major changes to help the managers out. He did some fantastic things, cleaning up the stores and organizing them."

But sweeping changes in how the giant retailer treated its workers failed to materialize, he said. "It just never came about.''

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