adrian wrote in Fri Dec 09, 2011 11:05 pm:Hooray,
I can assure you that you do *not* want to deal with this kind of people, nor do you wish to ever be associated in the future with them.
Adrian,
I can assure you that, this isn't about me at all - regardless of how much I may agree with you or others.
Yet, I can tell you for a fact, that we already have fellow FlightGear users with such SEO-"talents" among us, some of whom got in touch with me already regarding this whole issue, long time ago.
The FPS debacle is annoying enough that people have tried different things to deal with them, such as crashing the simulator or hard-coding certain strings. Using SEO techniques to deal with them, is just another twist to it - nothing more. Some people know C++, some people know how to create scenery, some people know how to create documentation, others know how to create aircraft - and even others are good at SEO, no matter if it's whitehat, greyhat or blackhat.
Curt mentioned already FPS affiliates complaining about getting penalized by google. I wouldn't even be surprised if this was in response to somebody already fighting them with their own weapons, obviously none of those measures could be linked to FlightGear so far. So, I don't see any problematic relationship personally - because we simply don't have any influence whatsoever.
adrian wrote in Fri Dec 09, 2011 11:05 pm:If you intention is to see me or other people stop contributing to Flightgear, by all means, start running with the blackhat guys. Just let me know so I can remove myself from this site and mailing list.
Like I mentioned previously, this really isn't about me at all. So, I don't understand your "threat" actually. Especially not if it is aimed at me personally?
Besides, there are other people who were truly instrumental to the project for years, who also threatened to leave the project under certain circumstances. Fast forward to a few years later, FlightGear is still alive and kicking, probably even more so than ever before.
The truth is, FlightGear is a decentralized project with a distributed nature, no matter how much we may agree or disagree here, there is nothing that we can do to enforce our own moral standards onto others (such as fellow FG users), except of course repeatedly saying what we don't condone or encourage publicly, and hoping people will respect that.
And Curt -as the project head- has done so already. Really, no point in others, less prominent figures, jumping on the same bandwagon.