That's the greeting awaiting people who log on to a macabre internet forum blamed for encouraging a pact between two men to jump off Beachy Head. Amelia Hill reports on the disturbing increase in suicide chat rooms

Josh began suffering nightmares when he was just months old, waking every 90 minutes and screaming as though, his mother still vividly remembers, someone was trying to kill him.

By the time he was two, he was developing one phobia after another: he couldn't go near escalators without almost fainting with fear, while his terror of fire meant his mother couldn't even light the oven if he was in the room.

He was five when he first started talking about killing himself. 'I was sitting on the side of the bath watching Josh bathing, when he suddenly looked up at me and said, "Sometimes I just want to die",' said Maxine, his mother. 'I almost fell onto the floor; what sort of five-year-old comes out with such a comment?'

When Maxine asked him why he felt like that, Josh replied that 'there are just so many bad things going on in the world and I just can't figure out how you would ever stop it all'.

By the time Josh was hospitalised and prescribed anti-depressants for the first time, he was nine and suicide had become a frequent topic of conversation.

His first serious attempt to kill himself came at the age of 12 and was followed by at least one serious attempt in every remaining year until he finally managed to end his life at the age of 19.

The exact reasons for Josh's suicide remain unclear, but his mother has the crumb of comfort that he was supported by others who were in equally desperate situations.

But that support emanated from an unlikely source: he was a regular visitor to an online suicide forum. Like many others, Josh frequently logged on to the Usenet newsgroup alt.suicide.holiday (Ash), a pro-choice suicide internet message board.

'I knew he used to access these sites and have long conversations throughout the night with other site users who felt as wretched as he did,' Maxine told The Observer from her home in Ottawa, Canada. 'I had heard the rumours that they exchanged details on the best way to commit suicide and gave advice on how to get hold of the means of dying, but Josh always denied that and told me the sites comforted and supported him,' she added. 'It was only when he died that I logged on myself to Ash, his favourite site, to see what they really talked about.'

The existence of forums created by and for those with suicidal tendencies came to mass public attention for the first time last week when the bleak story of Michael Gooden and Louis Gillies finally came to a tragic end.

The two young men had 'met' on the Ash newsgroup in May last year and, within days, made a suicide pact. After a last meal and a few drinks at the Beachy Head Hotel, at the top of Britain's highest chalk cliffs in East Sussex, they strode the 200 yards through fog to the edge of the cliffs, and prepared to fling themselves to their deaths.

At the final moment, however, Gillies received a phone call from a shocked friend who talked him away from the edge. The unemployed IT graduate from Glasgow handed the phone to Gooden, but the 35-year-old from south London refused to change his mind and ran over the cliff.

'I would just like to let you know that assure-me [Gooden's web name] has caught the bus,' Gillies announced on the Ash site later that day, adopting the site's euphemism for suicide.

'He was very determined. He did not flinch. He ran over the precipice in UNBELIEVABLE meteorological conditions. Inspirational, poignant, mesmerising... I hope he has found peace.'

Gillies's message caught the attention of police and he was arrested on the unusual charge of aiding and abetting a suicide. But last Tuesday, on the day he was due to face the court, Gillies hanged himself in his Glasgow flat.

The rise in the number and popularity of chat rooms created by those with suicidal tendencies, to offer a forum in which those suffering similar distress can discuss their anguish, has led to a surge in stories like that of Gillies.

In Norway recently a 17-year-old Austrian woman met a 20-year-old Norwegian man with whom she had made an internet pact to plunge together to their deaths from a 2,000ft cliff called Prekestolen, or Pulpit Rock. Similar stories have been reported in Australia, Japan and Korea, while in America, newspapers have referred to an 'epidemic' of pro-choice websites.

'These sites differ in their attitude toward suicide,' said Professor Georg Felber, chairman of the German Society for Suicide Prevention. 'There are those sites run by people who actively promote suicide, who portray it as the cleanest solution or as a unique, consistent attitude and who offer themselves as a companion in the final hours.

'These sites provide detailed guidance on suicide methods and give directions on how to acquire implements of suicide, such as weapons and drugs,' he said.

It was on a site like this that a teenager from Tokyo obtained enough potassium cyanide to kill herself from a mail order poison service. The man who posted the advert, a Dr Kiriko, was found to have enough poison in his stock to kill 3,000 people. Kiriko has since killed himself.

'There are, however, other sites in which the exchange of suicide fantasies and methods are not welcome,' added Felber. 'These sites offer users a free space to examine and formulate suicidal thoughts that are otherwise taboo, and that can help them go on with life, feeling that they are not alone.'

Ash, the site on which Gillies and Gooden met, and which Josh frequented, is the most popular, and probably the oldest, English-language suicide internet group, dating back to 1987. 'Anybody who encourages another to suicide as part of the Ash subculture is resisted and if they are part of a mailing list they are immediately banned,' said a moderator of one pro-choice mailing list. 'But if someone posted up suggestions of methods they were thinking about using, someone else would come back with advice on which option carried the least risks of it going wrong.

'People have met up in our group and committed suicide together,' he admitted. 'These people have a sense of being isolated and alone in life and simply want a companion in death.'

'These sites are dangerous,' said Keith Hawton, professor of psychiatry at Oxford University's Centre for Suicide Research. 'One of their founding theories is that they should be placed under no supervision whatsoever and feature no input from experts at all, and what you are left with is suicidal people counselling suicidal people, which is about as dangerous as it can get.

'A recurring feature of these sites seems to be the presence of voyeuristic people who get their kicks from encouraging others to commit suicide. There is definitely a seductive element.'

But Hawton admits that, despite 'racking their brains', his colleagues and he have been unable to devise a way the sites can be regulated. 'I don't see a solution to these sites,' he said. 'There seems to be no way of stopping or controlling them, just a sad, awful proliferation which will lead to the deaths of more people who, in an alternative environment, could be saved.'