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No ****, Sherlock! (another Brit saying!)

By proving a negative..

All I'm getting at is by posting this you denied you read PMs but no one can prove this. By calling these people out here and explaining this you planted a seed of questioning in yourself.

Which you doubtless know is not possible.

Here's something for you that may help. Or not.

Quite a bunch of us here have known Robert for lo this decade and more. I am one of this bunch.

While he can range from the utterly charming to the "god I want to kick his arse SO hard" in his demeanour, I would trust his integrity completely.

How would you have handled the whole situation differently?

Why not just ban the people? Why was a huge announcement made...especially if Robert initially agreed to help with the new site? Okay so people are being spammed but that doesn't mean we need a near 30 page thread for it. Just puts judgment at question here and it's nice that you are vouching for Robert but if you do not know him in real life then how do you trust someone on a forum?...

What I was telling you succinctly is that you'd been asking me to prove a negative.

Burden of proof really shouldn't be a new concept to anyone on this forum and I'm not going to play guilty-until-proven-innocent game with you to try to gain your "trust" to use PMs because I don't read your PMs and lose nothing at all by failing to prove a negative to you.

If you PM or not I'll keep not knowing and not caring just the same, I can live with failing to convince you about PMs and because I only read the private messages of the cool cats* you have nothing at all to worry about.

*For the particularly obtuse who might not get that, that was a joke. The part about reading the cool people's messages that is, not the part about not being enthralled by your PMs.

By observing how what he says matches what he does over a long time.

But, I won't add more to the 30 pages, it likely won't have any effect on your beliefs.

I see..

Actually that is a common mis-perception and proving a negative is possible.

The point is a bit more nuanced than that, in that it is inherently much more difficult, and that the logical burden of proof rests with the folks like hawkeye who make the baseless accusations and walk off.

Only with some sorts of negatives, where there are clear falsifiability criteria.

Here, you COULD prove you are UN-trustworthy by violating a trust.

But you can't really prove you ARE trustworthy, because at any moment it is possible you will do something that breaches trust.

What huge announcement? I didn't even bother making a new topic, just a reply here. Normally, we do not communicate such things at all, often to our great discomfort while watching members accuse us on the boards of things we do not do or accusing us of not doing things that we do do.

But this is, what we refer to in technical terms, a cluster-**** that I discovered in the middle of the night while actually putting out existing fires unrelated to a2k. And I opted to do a lot of things differently, not the least of which is the rather drastic step taken of suspending Philforum member access to PMs entirely.

Our normal policy is to not disclose anything about it to anyone other than the user. Both to protect their privacy as well as to avoid inciting them to try to circumvent the ban (e.g. talking about them, which is why I've repeatedly asked not to grind axes against them here or bash their project).

However the scale of this is such that there is no possible way to have kept it private and we opted for one of our rarer uses of public explanations about what we are doing and take advantage of the greater transparency.



They actually used this thread to collect the user names to do so, only at the very end (starting last night) is it now about the spam they were using it for towards the end.



You have no compunction at all about casting aspersions on the judgment of others based on only knowing them on an internet forum, why is that suddenly insufficient evidence when it comes to my defense?

I post under my real name here. I know many of members here in real life. This community was founded in 2002. That is a very long history of internet community management that I have on the record and they certainly know me better than you do and if you think your entitled to cast doubt on my character based on your few minutes in this forum why is what is good for the goose not good for the gander here? As fecklessly as you throw around character doubt you sure gain a passion for unavailable evidence when it comes to character support.

As U know I was banned from PF before the merger. Still I arrived at A2K. Now my PM are blocked... I did not spam or harm your businesses as far as I am aware. Now I get punished for what MANoble does; is thât virtual Justice ?

Yes, it's just that the absolutism in the quote is a pet peeve.



Yeah, and because it's (to simplify the technology only a bit) impossible for it not to be possible it lets guys like hawkeye with an axe to grind come in and leave off some F.U.D. and then whether or not it can be substantiated by any evidence the F.U.D. creates unease.

Plus there's the whole having to violate a separate trust in order to prove the negative and all (if anyone who's approached me about the PMs wants to identify themselves they can, but I'm certainly not going to).

But more than anything else it really just comes down to not giving a whit about people's PMs. I've preferred every forum I've been on that didn't have them. I go to forums for topics, not PMs. Forums with PMs get annoying topics about PMs. I much preferred an a2k without PMs except for the fact that people made annoying "since we don't have PMs" (and don't remember that we do have email) topics where they post they'd want to PM as a public topic.

Fair enough. We all have our dear, furry little peeves.

No, it was a measure that allowed me to sleep. After specific accounts were banned some returned repeatedly and kept sending messages. After hours of Whack-a-Mole I employed a more crude mechanism that would allow me to prevent the spam while also getting a nap in. I'm leaving it there while I continue to sort this out and apologize to the thousands of others from Philforum (and any new members, which we also have to block due to the whack-a-mole routine) who are not involved. It looks like a half-dozen or so folks are responsible and some are persistent and shameless enough to necessitate that cruder measure.

It's a pity because when I first found out about the recruiting offered to help if they'd stop doing it underhandedly but VCS mocked me instead, supporting their efforts to recruit from a2k as well and saying that a2k user dissatisfaction is "where he comes in" with "money out of hand" as opposed to my "money in hand" (whatever his delusional distinction there is supposed to mean) to react "to a bad business model".

Given that they appear to intend to continue VCS's "brain drain" campaign on a2k we've had to respond. This is all as unnecessary as it was completely duplicitous and untoward and I take particular exception to the rejection of what I thought was a perfectly reasonable offer to take their recruiting above board myself.

Well. It's a measure what keeps my a-wake. I think U got it right in the beginning; a forum without PM would be preferable to this situation. I did a Business Ethics - course once and think from your perspective your are doing well. We call it exess in self-defense; it means you felt attacked and overreacted. Thanks for your awnsers and openess !

Well Robert "Actions speak louder than words" your actions (this case you might have viewed our private messages) lead me to consider the possibility that you're invading my privacy. No need to attack me as a person, especially in this case seeing how I'm 100% innocent here and I'm just trying to figure some things out. You would do well to lose the attitude.

You obnoxiously conflate your accusations with my actions as if they were the same thing.

Just look at the logic for crying out loud, here, I'll show you with a deliberately extreme variable the circular logic you keep making me step through (which is at least as irritating as the accusation itself):

"your actions (this case you might have raped and murdered someone) lead me to consider the possibility that you're a rapist and a murderer."



I have attacked you "as a person" far less than you have in repeatedly casting FUD on my character. My only comment about you is to the extent that you are feckless in doing so and have no compunction making such character judgments after a few minutes on the internet while casting doubt on the near-decade of internet history I have with community members here.



I probably could, but quite frankly I ran out of patience late last night and am probably only due for more next week. But while we are playing this game (hypocritically calling for no stone throwing at the same time), let me mention again that you could lose a lot of your obnoxious and baseless accusations about "my actions" given that you know not a whit about them. That kind of thing might do something crazy like engender a hostile attitude or something.

I'll be less irritated when you be less irritating.

Whatever happened, or happens, thanks to the guys at A2K, I get the idea you have done quite a bit of work to accomodate the philforum people, it's appreciated. I have met some interesting new people over here. That's about all.