Banned... No good deed goes unpunished

I'm part of the group of people being banned there. Even if I admit I may have crossed the line with the people in the Foundation it always was as a defense against a treatment I didn't deserve at all.

I stated a problem I had with element14 in my country in a complete absence of information from them. I still had problems to understand what happened and why where some element14 customers asked to pay 3 months before real delivery. I spoke with lots of people in the company and nobody knew/care. So I address it in the RaspberryPi forums (where else should I have asked for help) to realize that the people behind the Foundation where more concerned about bussinnes partners than users (not customers as they treat people when they want to "take control".

The lack of maners of Liz Upton, Eben Upton, Abishur and JamesH lead me to think they may have a strange conception on how to help people. The only good thing they have made banning me it's making me interested enough to learn and make a better device / more open to learn.

I'm part of the group of people being banned there. Even if I admit I may have crossed the line with the people in the Foundation it always was as a defense against a treatment I didn't deserve at all.

I stated a problem I had with element14 in my country in a complete absence of information from them. I still had problems to understand what happened and why where some element14 customers asked to pay 3 months before real delivery. I spoke with lots of people in the company and nobody knew/care. So I address it in the RaspberryPi forums (where else should I have asked for help) to realize that the people behind the Foundation where more concerned about bussinnes partners than users (not customers as they treat people when they want to "take control".

The lack of maners of Liz Upton, Eben Upton, Abishur and JamesH lead me to think they may have a strange conception on how to help people. The only good thing they have made banning me it's making me interested enough to learn and make a better device / more open to learn.

And I'm part of the group of people not banned from there, but I remember reading some article and comments about someone who was trying to get a free R-Pi, and it really did was a tasteless post so I'm happier not to contribute to such a forum.

shabaz wrote:

 

And I'm part of the group of people not banned from there, but I remember reading some article and comments about someone who was trying to get a free R-Pi, and it really did was a tasteless post so I'm happier not to contribute to such a forum.

Personally, I distinguish between RasPi's front-page 'blog posts and the RasPi forum.  A lot of front-page stuff is marketing and self-promotion that irritates me at times, but there's also useful information about new revs so it's worth a skim.  OTOH, the RasPi forum is a wealth of technical information because of the large number of people who contribute, and people often post interesting technical problems for the community to solve.  This provides opportunities for both learning and teaching.

That's true. Good points.

José David Gea Esteban wrote:

 

I'm part of the group of people being banned there. Even if I admit I may have crossed the line with the people in the Foundation it always was as a defense against a treatment I didn't deserve at all.

 

I stated a problem I had with element14 in my country in a complete absence of information from them. I still had problems to understand what happened and why where some element14 customers asked to pay 3 months before real delivery. I spoke with lots of people in the company and nobody knew/care. So I address it in the RaspberryPi forums (where else should I have asked for help) to realize that the people behind the Foundation where more concerned about bussinnes partners than users (not customers as they treat people when they want to "take control".

 

The lack of maners of Liz Upton, Eben Upton, Abishur and JamesH lead me to think they may have a strange conception on how to help people. The only good thing they have made banning me it's making me interested enough to learn and make a better device / more open to learn.

Cobblers mate. IIRC you were really rude (yeh, I've been around a while!). You need to learn to accept when you been bad, and take the consequences. Seem odd to me there are about 10 people on here complaining about the moderators over there, and yet they have 35 thousand apparently happy customers. And the 10 complainers here were all banned for something or other. SImple statisitcs should give readers the idea of what's going on. WHich reminds me, I was gonig to email them to ask how many people have been banned from the site, just to get some idea of the percentages. Reckon that would be a fun number.

A simple way to get banned there is "concern trolling"

If you are concerned about something not working on the Pi, and if you believe it's a feature that should basically work (like usb host ports), than you will be banned as you are bad for sales.

If the foundation will be equal honest about the number of complaining customers as they are about the rest of their stuff, the numbers you will get will be as reliable as the number of votes for the president of a dictatorial banana republic.

It's not important as the boards purpose is focussed at a low cost educational tool, and learning how to troubleshoot electronics is educational 2. As most electronics are "throw away" nowadays, troubleshooting is also a dying art like programming.

I didn't think that stating something that's true to be rude. Maybe it got ruder because no answers were given to my concerns and I was been treated like a customer instead of a supporter with a (very serious to me) problem with one of their bussinnes partners. I have very a very personal opinion related to charities doing bussinnes and I just wanted to Foundation to make some movements in the charity direction (There was a valid concern in my "rude" asking). Given the fact that I didn't ewanted to be rude but just trying to express myself (with a not so high level of "english for anger situations" as it seems I needed) in a language it's not my first one... Maybe it was not so good excuse to attack me instead of tell me I was wrong on the attitude and take a look at the problem. But maybe I didn't deserve that. One bussinnes partner can be really rude with me but I can't express my concerns about what that bussinnes partner was doing using the charity...

That's an extrange way to have a relation with people with your same interests in a charity project, as I see it.

P.D.: As it seems you think I was "very rude" also I would appreciate a lot if you tell me where to improve my language skills for future anger iterations (Via personal message).

Well put Jose.

The need for me to have said anything is a sign in itself.

The issue has not been addressed even though I released code to help address the issue.

In my opinion I was not overly rude in my post. I stated simple facts such as most Linux distributions have a simple method to help new users set basic configuration items.

The simple fact of the matter the developer concerned happens to be the cheif honcho and really should know better.

The forum moderator lost the plot, destroyed any further converation and then tossed me.

I have no intention of ever communicating with developers on this level.

All this debate about who said what has little to do with what some see and understand as a cancer effecting development and uptake of the RPi.

Billy Thornton wrote:

 

Cobblers mate. IIRC you were really rude (yeh, I've been around a while!). You need to learn to accept when you been bad, and take the consequences. Seem odd to me there are about 10 people on here complaining about the moderators over there, and yet they have 35 thousand apparently happy customers. And the 10 complainers here were all banned for something or other. SImple statisitcs should give readers the idea of what's going on. WHich reminds me, I was gonig to email them to ask how many people have been banned from the site, just to get some idea of the percentages. Reckon that would be a fun number.

Hello Billy, I was banned on the Pi forum, although this was lifted after I asked as they had gone a little mad and not only banned my user name, but also my home static IP and my work static IP. When I asked (politely) why I was banned, I got a vague response about 'Concern Trolling' but no reference to a specific post. However, I firmly believe that the reason I was banned was because I had made a post quoting a mod, which showed that mod had a certain lack of flexibility in their decisions, that was all. I wasn't posting anything controversial, only reposted the mod post from a different thread. If people aren't happy to stand by their comments then they shouldn't make them.

My twitter account has also been blocked by the Foundation's twitter account. I was personally insulted on twitter by Liz, but hey ho, it is only twitter so no problem, I didn't react. However, my block came about when I made a tweet remarking on the use of profane language on the forum, which was then reposted and repeated by a mod. As it should be a child friendly forum, I didn't think the use of such language was appropriate. for that I was blocked, although interestingly, the comment I was talking about by the mod was deleted, which kind of shows guilt by association if you ask me. Again, stand by what you post.

It is interesting you remark on 35,000 happy customers. I have been part of that forum nearly since its inception (I think the Pi is a brilliant device, having bought 5) and there is less interaction now than there was when the Pi was released. I am sure this is down to a few things, but one of those is the attitude that the moderators are allowed to take. There are also a number of fanboi 'normal' posters that also tend to gang up on anyone saying anything less than positive. In one case, one of the mods thought it was amusing to remark on the poor grammar and spelling of a poster, who it turned out had lost a limb. I did say many months ago that unless there was a more liberal attitude towards open discussion on the forum, the mods would be left modding each other. With a rough estimate giving 200,000 Pi's out there, that forum should be heaving, but as I say there seems less going on there now than when 0 pi's were available.

Maybe it's because the hype is slowly fading away, and people start to realise that the Pi is not the perfect media center they expected it to be.

It's not a perfect desktop replacement either, and as long as it corrupts it's sd cards upon a power failure, I wouldn't use it embedded.

It has a powerfull gpu, but besides for video playback in omxplayer and xbmc, and for rendering graphics in quake 3, it's hardly used.

The scary thing is that all reported problems from launch time keep on coming back in the troubleshooting section.

In 6 months time, they didn't really fix a thing.

People claim the usb works 500% better now, but besides my prolific serial adapter that maybe works now (no idea for how long...), I can't find any other usb device or

combination of devices that works stable now with all the implemented patches.

Even more scary is the fact that it's impossible to get a list of things that are suposed to work. Maybe that's on purpose, or maybe the foundation has no idea either?

It would have been a great device if it worked as expected. Now I have the impression we can compare it with cheap chinese electronic devices.

I don't think that situation will change soon.

As they are a charity organisation; I don't understand why they are so afraid of posts on their forum that might be bad for sales...

It looks like they are simply afraid of the truth..

Steve Read wrote:

 

When I asked (politely) why I was banned, I got a vague response about 'Concern Trolling' but no reference to a specific post.

That's perhaps the biggest single problem over there, RPF and admins pinning the label of troll on people who describe their very real concerns about very real problems.  Those problems exist, and they will never go away when the people who comment on the problems politely are tarred and banned for their efforts to improve the situation.