Thorsten wrote in Thu Sep 17, 2015 4:11 pm:In my opinion a server becomes "official" if it is resolveable as a subdomain of flightgear.org, and/or if it is announced as an official one by the flightgear wiki.
Pretty much everyone can edit the wiki. You could declare anything official infrastructure by the mere expense of making a wiki entry. Doesn't fly. I think the first three words of your statement are the key here... As for the domain, that's also privately owned and paid for. See above...
So everyone acts as an individual, there is no acting in behalf of the project/community? There is no whole, no commonality?
In your opinion Curtis, as the owner of flightgear.org, could associate
http://www.flightgear.org with an IP of a webserver containing offensive content or malware, and you are okay with it because Curtis owns the domain and pays for it? Because there is no association between the domain and the abstract entity "flightgear", however this entity is defined?
Luckily Curtis doesn't share your point of view.
In fact, Curtis recently backed up and legitimated the decision to ban two members from the flightgear forum
by "a larger group". He did this, because he doesn't feel that he is acting as an individual, but as part of something. The two members were banned
on behalf of the core community. Though he is the owner of the domain, he felt the obligation to that entity "community" to not use his power on his own.
Those two members were
excommunicated, because they were
harming the interests of the project. They did it in many ways, one way was to illegitimately advocating an
unofficial ressource as an
offical one on the wiki.
This shows that my opinion is actually -as you say- "the key here", as it obviously reflects the opinion of Curtis and apparently of various other people.
There indeed does exist an entity "flightgear", you can act on behalf of it, and if you do so, you have to respect the interests of it. By advocating your server on wiki and enjoying a DNS association you express to be part of this entity (Another story would be if DNS and wiki entry would be established against your will, but this doesn't seem to be the case right now), and therefore you mustn't violate the community interests.
Now there is the question whether arbitrary banning is such an violation or not. I don't need to answer it here. And to state it clearly: I am not stating that Rob/evilslut didn't have very valid reasons for his decisions. I am just questioning the comprehension of some people here that every admin of an xyz.flightgear.org server can offend user of it arbitrary without harming flightgear. Which is obviously NOT the case.
Luckily, it is not necessary that Thorsten shares this point of view, because as long as Curtis believes in the existence of the entity "project/community" and lives it, Thorsten has to accept this concept: In his understanding, Curtis as the owner and payer of the domain is legitimated to "enforce" this concept.
It is true, that this entity is depended on the goodwill of some people, who have a lot of power by circumstances. I thank Curtis and various other for not abusing their power and to believe in some kind of constitution of this project.