Banned... No good deed goes unpunished

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.

Speaking as someone who received a Raspberry Pi as present yesterday, and is now online shopping for accessories, reading the 'Getting Started' guides, exploring the many forums and communities, and as someone who has extensive experience of using forums, moderating and being moderated, it is extremely important to maintain a happy, collaborative, community, and moderators mostly do a thankless job which is absolutely essential.

It is also essential to recognise when you've had your knuckles cracked by a moderator, what it was that you did to get that painful attention, learn from it, grow in character, adapt and become a better member of the community and assist the forum by maintaining the happy, collaborative, community spirit.

It doesn't take a minute to see why a moderator would take issue with the post concerned. The information contained within-it is business related (not community related) and should have been PM'd to an official staff member if the OP truly wanted to help the RaspPi people stay on top. A public forum which is meant to provide a great resource for the community, is not a place to be spreading rumour/speculation/negativity about the product the forum is provided for.

Common sense prevails.

lev eller wrote:

 

It doesn't take a minute to see why a moderator would take issue with the post concerned. The information contained within-it is business related (not community related) and should have been PM'd to an official staff member if the OP truly wanted to help the RaspPi people stay on top. A public forum which is meant to provide a great resource for the community, is not a place to be spreading rumour/speculation/negativity about the product the forum is provided for.

 

Common sense prevails.

Reading the whole thread also prevails. Reasons for posting on forum explained. Negativity not intended or, indeed, implied.

My issue was not with a moderator taking issue, my issue is with getting banned for trying to be helpful. The post is still there. If the moderator was concerned with the things you mention, the post would have been removed. That would have been common sense.

Quantify and qualify what do you mean about "extensive experience of using forums." afaik you just joined this one.

There is much more than what you can see in the surface, and one of the biggest issues I find with some of the moderators on the RPF forum is that they have the constant habit to answer questions that nobody asked, and if your question is not what they qualify as inline with their view of the world you could be treated as a second class dumb newbie or if you make any statements about issues you become a concern troll.

IMHO moderators are the ones that increase the SNR in several orders of magnitude over there, the should stay quiet, if they don't have any useful piece of information or are not able to share, but if somebody goes to the extremes they should "moderate," not just judge and sentence people willing to cooperate and participate.

-J

lev eller wrote:

 

Speaking as someone who received a Raspberry Pi as present yesterday, and is now online shopping for accessories, reading the 'Getting Started' guides, exploring the many forums and communities

That part's cool. and I hope that we can help you on this forum as well if you need it.

What's not cool is when you speak as someone who clearly hasn't read the very long history of abuse of people who were trying to help on the RPF forums but got labelled "troll" for politely expressing real concerns about real problems, and banned for their efforts instead of being engaged politely and logically.

It is indeed the job of moderators to help create a "happy, collaborative, community spirit" as you say, but that is not what they do over there.  Instead they raise the heat by exterminating perfectly normal expressions of concern which are part of the fault reporting process, an essential part of engineering.  Their motto seems to be

Workers shall be whipped until morale improves.

That is no way to "moderate" a community into happiness.  Indeed it is not actually moderation at all, but culling since their favourite weapon is the ban.  They do not seek a moderate balance.

Welcome to the Element 14 Pi group, but you'll need to read up a lot more before you understand why there are many expressions of concern here..

Morgaine.