stuart wrote in Mon Feb 15, 2016 1:57 pm:There remains a ban in place quoting banned members of the forum (specifically Jabberwocky and IAHM-COL) except in exceptional circumstances.
I wasn't even aware of such restrictions (despite being listed as one of those helping maintain the forum...), and without meaning to offend anybody: I think we need to tread very carefully here - i.e. if differentiating clearly between quotes that are obviously used to make up for someone's ban (campaigning via new user accounts and/or existing users), or if the quoted content is relevant in the context of the corresponding discussion.
My concern here being that maintaining such a "ban" on these terms would possibly substantiate all those claims we've seen about the FlightGear project using censorship against people we don't agree with.
As you, and others, undoubtedly know - many of us often don't agree with the way the project is headed, so I find it very problematic to automatically ban quotes just on the notion that the quoted person was previously banned.
Equally, I have myself participated in a number of debates with some of the most senior contributors, and former core developers - the most recent example being the infamous
FlightGear Development Push thread - and it has been suggested that my role in that thread might have gotten me banned from this forum (certainly if I were affiliated with fgmembers) - and I did in fact receive a PM from you, Stuart, suggesting that I reconsider my participation here based on my paricipation in such debates.
Thus, given the statement above, I am slightly irritated, i.e. that just quoting someone who got banned, automatically implies consequences for the person quoting that person.
Looking only at my own involvement, participation in the
FlightGear Development Push might have gotten me banned, but there's roughly 8k other postings I made that people should be free to quote, unrelated to my account having been banned/removed.
And quite frankly, I would not want to be part of a community where we cultivate/encourage this kind of attitude towards opinions that don't agree with the "establishment", just because people criticize the project and suggest ways to improve things - at that point, the term "censorship" becomes entirely valid.
Thus I do hope that these rules are augmented and not just automatically enforced - because at that point I will definitely reconsider my involvement, because the FlightGear project would be headed in a very unfortunate direction in my opinion, for the sake of convenience...