alioth wrote:
For all European GA, EuroGA is a good place
Ditto. EuroGA is the best pilot forum I have ever found. Immensely useful, as well as entertaining and fun.
Buckerfan wrote:
EuroGA is the best pilot forum I have ever found. Immensely useful, as well as entertaining and fun.
Fully agreed.
Van’s Air Force: moderation is done on the basis of “US patriotism”
You should also look at any site which is free for you to use from the owner’s POV.
Any genuinely unmoderated site will fill up with p0rn, tending towards the illegal sort. That is just where most interest is online… I’ve seen it happen, too.
So one must moderate – even if one pretends one does not (as is the case in certain GA forums on the mainland – “free speech” marketing is popular there). Then you have to made some hard decisions on policy.
Ask yourself why every forum you know isn’t full of political extremists – communist / arab / other extremists. Hey, what happened to free speech? This is disgraceful! All the champagne socialists and the other leftists in Europe and the US will jump on you, and rightly so!!! Nowadays the trans crowd will set fire to your server company; they don’t mess around.
The answer is that the admins know this is a route to hell, so they don’t allow it.
If one allows a political topic, one must have a policy to not have extremist views. But then you just get clever people going right up to the line, creating situations where the admin looks terrible whichever way he moves. There is a particular technique for achieving that. Look at the Russian invasion thread we had. It will be back one day but with instant deletion of “alternative” views.
So I am not surprised a US site bans anti-US material. You have to believe in the country you choose to live in. Otherwise, you should leave and live in the other one. It’s a lifestyle choice.
As someone who has learnt the “moderator” tasks at “School” in Compuserve, if anyone remembers that, I fully agree with Peter on these things.
At that time, the job of a Sysop had responsibilities which went much further than today. In the CSI world, which was one of two online worlds, if you screwed up badly enough, you’d be banned from “the net” as a whole, not just from a forum. Sysops therefore had to be extremely vigilant and it was an unwritten rule that you don’t sysop and participate unless special conditions warrant it.
The job of a moderator is tough at the best of times, the tightrope between moderator and participant is one which very few people actually can walk without falling off at times. Peter is one of the few, who does this quite well indeed, the fact of the double role is bound to generate some friction at times, no way around it.
I’ve seen it happen a few times that after a big “clean up” the “free speech” proponents tried to set up a forum of their own where they could practice what they preach. Usually, those collapsed within a few months, of the dozens I knew only one I am aware of has actually survived the test of time. So this shows that those who shout the loudest are very often those who will fail once in power. Something which can not only be seen in fora but often enough in parliamentary politics btw.
EuroGa is a place which stands out in many regards. Let’s keep it that way. And sometimes remind ourselves that it is not necessarily the job of fora participants to make the mod job more difficult than it is.
Sysops therefore had to be extremely vigilant and it was an unwritten rule that you don’t sysop and participate unless special conditions warrant it.
Virtually all mods/admins run a second persona and use that for participation. This was never done on EuroGA. It probably should have…
I’ve seen it happen a few times that after a big “clean up” the “free speech” proponents tried to set up a forum of their own where they could practice what they preach. Usually, those collapsed within a few months
A splinter group from socata.org, which got fed up with the modding there (especially when four mods were appointed while the owner got a full time job at some avionics company, and started throwing bibles around) lasted some years. I was there for just one year and left as it filled up with p0rn 
I heard the other week that it was finally shut down, after an annual call for donations yielded $0.
Compu$erve (I was on it for years) was a terrible model but it owned the market, and back then the whole world wanted to “say things” in communities. Who remembers EFFSIG? All the debates about DES getting cracked, the NSA reading our emails hence PGP… It was also terrible because they forced your username to be same as the name on your credit card – a recipe for all kinds of nasty stuff, not to mention killing off real debate. PPL/IR implemented that not long before I left in 2015; no idea whose dumb idea that was.
Peter wrote:
It was also terrible because they forced your username to be same as the name on your credit card – a recipe for all kinds of nasty stuff, not to mention killing off real debate. PPL/IR implemented that not long before I left in 2015;
If you mean the name exactly as it is printed on the credit card, that’s not the case. If you mean your actual name rather than an alias, it’s true. In any case your name is editable in the profile for PPL/IR.
I any case lots of things can happen in eight years and it’s not really fair to imply that things are the same now as they were then.
Sure, but you confirm what I said
Someone went through the database and changed all the names to the real (and normally hidden) account names.
If you force a name and disallow a nickname, a lot of really educational discussion disappears immediately. For example most discussion on experiences in icing disappears immediately.
Also a lot of people will go back and delete a lot of their old posts, which trashes old threads, but most people won’t notice in a hidden forum which has no SEO.
Peter wrote:
If you force a name and disallow a nickname, a lot of really educational discussion disappears immediately. For example most discussion on experiences in icing disappears immediately.
Agree to disagree – in closed forum you actually can use real names and have honest conversations.
Until someone “interesting” joins up and reads past posts, and threatens to sue lots of people. This happened That event totally changed the participation dynamic. The great majority of the membership never used the forum anyway.
Also anybody from the CAA can join up anytime. Unless it is a “top knob” you won’t recognise the name; not everybody checks names on google, linked-in, etc.
I think we have pretty honest conversations here; we’ve had a few pretenders but one soon spots them. The main thing which holds back postings is that EuroGA is international and most won’t criticise anything in their own country.
There is no “for ever closed forum”. New people join up and trawl through old posts. Or there is some admin cockup and google gets in there and indexes the database including everybody’s names and addresses (this happened).
Its very easy to threaten to sue someone if they don’t like what is written. They very rarely carry out the threat and if they did there is a very high chance of them losing and costing themselves a great deal of money in both their own and defendants legal fees.
Even here where you can basically sue ( in taking someone to court) by paying 1Euro, it doesn’t often happen and when it does no one wins in the end.
It is a meaningless threat, often accompanied by some dodgy solicitors letter in an attempt to frighten someone to back down.
The television companies I worked for used to get these threats regularly and the vast majority weren’t even worth sending to the company’s legal team.
