Do we really NEED to be fair to them? Why do we always have to be the good guys, the ones that don't ban anyone, the ones that don't fight back?
I didn't say that we don't have to fight back, per se, but that if there is retaliation of any kind, it is done with the best information available, and that we do it as ethically as possible - which includes acknowledging their side to the situation.
Like xenForo being an existing competitive software that was just about to be released...............
.........Tell me, isn't that what Wedge is about?
It comes under the category of what the opposition is doing, which is naturally allowed. The caveat of course is that 'as long as the competition isn't Wedge.'
Yup. It's all fine for the team to go 'hey, look at what that other system is doing' to indicate how awesome it is, but all bets are off if it happens to be us, and that's always been, and always likely to be, the case.
I don't mind if they remove our links, yes it's their website, yes they dictate the rules, like we do.
There's a difference between having rules, enforcing rules and telling your users about said rules. Like I said, there weren't any rules I'd been advised about prior to the message from Oldiesmann asking me to remove Wedge from my signature.
I'd have been fine to comply with rules if I'd seen a shred of evidence to validate the fact that this was a rule that applied equally to everyone, as opposed to what feels like it was made up on the spot.
- their pseudo 'Core Values' page. They never stop violating most of them. As soon as a flame war erupts, they just don't give a shit about these 'values' anymore. I'm tempted to think no one in the team ever read them. If you're going to edict a series of rules to convince people you're so cool, then either live by them or die with them!
Oh, don't even get me started about the Core Values bullshit. I demonstrated that vbgamer had broken just about every single core value on the list, but every single point was argued - by Kindred, no less - as being not important.
After the January 2010 drama+BS, every returning and every new team member was supposed to electronically sign an agreement, including promising to adhere to the Core Values. You can obviously see how well that worked out.
- all links to all other forum packages, including friendly forks and paid-for competitors. Otherwise it's clearly an attack against us.
Of course it is.
But they don't acknowledge that.
If you did that, would you openly admit it? Or would you start explaining what the rules are before expecting people to follow them?
It's a bit like one of the episodes of the very first season of QI. It's an odd-one-out round and Phil Jupitus exclaims: "What kind of hellish quiz is this? Guess which one's the odd one out... haha, NONE of them!" People have a set of expectations, whether rightly or wrongly. Phil's expectation, for example, is that on a quiz show, the questions being asked should be feasible to answer and that in a round entitled the 'odd one out' round, one of them is demonstratably the odd one out compared to the others, i.e. that the rules as presented at the start are the rules actually followed later on.
Here, the only way I can see it is that they've taken a rule that was never fully explained, broadened its horizons to suit, and applied it to us. The best bit was that when I argued this originally, Kindred explained to me that the 'no competition' rule was something I should have known about at the time, because of the no-competitive-ads rule. At that point, I actually gave up trying to argue with him because the rules don't seem to apply in his brain properly.
Then you have things like:
http://www.bryandeakin.com/index.php/topic,941.msg9346.html#msg9346 going on.
I'll let you make of that what you will, but for someone who hasn't told any actual lies, per se, I'd say he's done a decent bit of skirting the truth on occasion, and he has actually implicated RR in libel, on the basis of claiming that Les (ARG) was actually RR being a troll under another name. (Which means, if you're going to call someone out like that, you really, really should be able to back up your assertion especially when it doesn't take much to refute it.)
<br /><br />cough, cough.
