by Hooray » Thu Nov 02, 2017 10:05 pm
we've seen people disappear for various reasons, this being an open source project based on people volunteering their time and expertise to make contributions, it is usually a good idea to be transparent about possibly controversial incidents, people and decisions. This isn't the first time something like this has happened - and it's one of the reasons why I generally suggest not to delete problematic topics/postings, but merely lock them - so that people can read up on the events leading to a certain decision. It has very little to do with "drama" actually - especially in the light of propaganda spread by other parties.
Let's assume for a second I get banned here, I have accumulated a posting history of roughly 10k messages over the years - some of which are rather pointed/critical of the project as a whole, some maybe even offensive and attacking other contributors - possibly using foul language - thus, I am about to get banned - yet, I am foreseeing that this may finally happen, so I go ahead and delete/edit some of my most controversial postings, and then go to another place (forum) to tell everybody just how **$§!)(!"()"§ up this whole place and the whole community is, I could literally spend years making the case that there is some personal campaign going on to discredit me - however, none of that is possible if we retain a history of the events and postings/comments - so that should someone really care enough to make a big fuss about it, we can tell them to refer to the archives.
Again, personally I am not a big fan of simply deleting stuff - but given the profanity involved in many postings made by the corresponding people, it kinda makes sense - or the forum moderators themselves would be violating the forum rules by just locking topics that violate the forum rules. It's obviously a fine line to be walked, but being transparent about this is absolutely appropriate.
Given how this whole dilemma has unfolded over the years, this degree of transparency and integrity has enormously helped setting apart this community from the other place and the atmosphere over there.
Unfortuntately, such high standards are a double-edged sword, too - some of us once discussed possible measures to deal with certain threats once and for all, but would not even receive feedback from the very parties involved in maintaining this degree of transparency and integrity (the same people now being yelled at for being dictators and censoring the forum ...), because they felt it would not match their own standards - otherwise, on purely technical grounds it would be straightforward to deal with these challenges, and people - but that is obviously not something that this community was interested in pursuing ... Just like some of the team were originally opposed to removing forum members.