Graham Banks wrote:Sam Hull wrote:
(a) Sorry for weighing in late. Our downtown Dallas office building has lost power and shut down my entire network two business days in a row, and I couldn't get back to the board after posting the guidance from Quentin for the CCC mods until now.
(b) There has been a rather large misunderstanding, and Jeremy has slightly misquoted what I passed along from ICD/Your Move. The guidance is simply to not tolerate anything that looks like a LINK to illegitimate software in CCC. No one said anything about censoring discussions or removing posts that simply make allusions or offer evaluations. Graham misunderstood the intent of the guidance - I have clarified it in detail for him this evening via IM. Where the issue of clones is concerned, and for the board in general, the goal of fair and balanced moderation has not changed, and there is no desire for favoritism in ANY direction.
(c) I hope Jeremy will reconsider his decision. I have not had a chance to converse with him directly and have received no PMs from him. I posted responses in the moderator forum as soon as I regained internet access, but I am still locked out of e-mail and will be until tomorrow morning. I think Jeremy has been an outstanding moderator and I fully support his philosophy of moderation - always have.
(d) I don't set moderation policy. I passed along a request to the CCC mods that I received from Quentin, which came as the result of certain members haranguing ICD about real, suspected, and imagined clones. Graham misunderstood the message, performed some moderation on that basis, and Jeremy decided to post a grand exit without waiting to get any clarification about the guidance.
(e) Personally I am surprised that two CCC mods who share an opinion cannot simply outvote and override one mod on those occasions when has a different view. I got regularly overridden for two whole terms in CTF. I haven't complained, and nobody died. It's a discussion board, folks.
(f) If a member runs for moderator and is elected, I think it is fair to expect him to honor his commitment and serve out the term.
-Sam-
In a nutshell, our sponsor would like the CCC mod team to be as aggressive as possible in removing anything that looks like a questionable link, or any other encouragement to acquire software of questionable legitimacy.
This was the part of the message that I misinterpreted. My understanding was that any post praising the strength or qualities of the engines in question was actually encouraging members to acquire them.
Once Jeremy gave me the go ahead to remove some of the threads as long as I left a message (he was going to bed at the time), I went ahead and did so. However, it seems that I was too liberal in my interpretation of what he actually meant.
I therefore apologise to Sam, to my fellow moderators and also to the forum membership for the controversy and unfortunate situation that has occurred due to this genuine misunderstanding.
I am happy to work with Jeremy and Swami to undo as much of the damage as we can, if they're prepared to do so. This would include an amendment of the announcement posted.
Cheers,
Graham.
I read what happened and there are many thins that actually I don't like at all.
1) If some commercial author pushed the owner of the site to censor Ippo links (as probably has happened) then the owner of the site should openly and trasparently state that "the forum will not tolerate..and so and so ..." and not pushing his pawns behind closed doors to do the dirty job.
If the owner of the site wants to protect his cutomer and do not reveal that has been pushed by someone to take this decision then this is fair, but should at least put his face on this decision and state this clearly _before_ starting to remove stuff.
This has not happened.
2) Because the order has been sent privately, then privately the owner of the site should have been take counter actions if/when found something was going wrong and not (sorry for this italian expression) "give shit" publicly to a pawn/moderator that mistakenly made a double instead of a single push.
So I feel unconfortable to post in a forum influenced by "hidden" commercial engines companies (I'm quite sure of this because a site owner doesn't wake up a morning chosing to ban something if not pushed by some customer, I think I know quite well how these things work because is my day job BTW) and whose policy is not transparently declared before corresponding actions are taken. If I go to Rybka forum I know Rybka controls everything, but this is ok as long as "Rybka" is written on the name of the forum and it's up to me to decide if posting or not (I don't), but here I didn't expect something like what's happened.
At last I would like to say something also to Graham.
Graham, you have been voted by people here and you are moderator because of forum users (not owners) put you there, so you deserve loyalty to people that voted you, not to someone else. If someone else is in a position to force you to do something it is up to you to decide what to do, but I think that would be fair to say _before_ : "Dear users, dear people that trust on me, I inform you that I was asked to remove stuff, I have accepted that duty and I will start it now"
