Maintaining a Healthy Forum

[builderflyer]

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I just reviewed the moderator logs and there were not any edits or deletions of your post. Your statement is 100% completely false. Perhaps you did not hit submit. Please contact me if you need technical assistance. Thanks.[/quote]


Chris,

Well that's interesting! I would swear I saw it posted as soon as I had submitted it. The other message I posted about the same time regarding Rio Linda remains posted. Are you sure one of the other censorers hasn't done something of which you are unaware. If it was indeed my error, I apologize for my unjust recent criticism.

Art

[mike.smith]

Censors and moderators are two different things. We have moderators here, not censors. Sometimes a moderator must censor something, but I have seen VERY little of that in this forum. Maybe too little.

https://blog.disqus.com/when-does-moder ... censorship

[kmacht]

I have written posts in the past, clicked submit and have has them go missing a few minutes later. It isn't the moderators, I think it is just a quirk of the forum software sometimes.

The fact is that we don't own the forum, Chris does. He gets to choose what and how things are discussed on his forum. If people aren't pleased with that they can always go start another forum that suits them. That's how this one started. Yahoo forums used to be the go to for sonex discussion before this forum was started. I plan to stick around here.

Personally I have never felt censored here. I have posted both positive and negative comments about the Sonex company, had long discussions on alternate engines, and had disagreements with other members. Not once has one of my posts been deleted or modified by a moderator. The key here and on any forum is to not say anything here thar you wouldn't feel comfortable saying face to face.

My only request would be that the moderators don't just delete or modify posts without making a comment that the post was modified or deleted. The best forums I am on have the moderators replace offending posts with a statement saying it was deleted for violating forum rules. If a thread is locked the last post is from the moderator stating why. This makes it so there isn't the appearance of censorship.

Keith
#554

[DCASonex]

I have also had posts that mysteriously disappeared, and since those were mostly non-controversial, think it may be a website problem, not due to moderators or any censorship. Also, if only reading the daily digests, it is easy to overlook the link at the bottom of a long list of posts that shows additional posts that did not get included in the e-mailed version.

My concern with the mention of increased activity by moderators is that it can all too easily Become censorship. While I am sure the folks at Sonex might like to reach out and whop someone up-side-the-head, negative posts can have a valuable function. If the folks at Jabiru had paid attention to comments about their engines on various forums and to customer complaints, they might be a much stronger company with much larger market share. Negative comments on a forum or two did not bring them to grief, a simple search shows wide spread discussions of the problems on many sites and in many languages, ignoring those comments did hurt them. CAMit was an semi-independent machine shop that made the parts for and assembled the Jabiru engines. They were geared for 90 engines a month, and after Jabiru's reputation was damaged, they could not survive at less than 1/10 of that production. That simple fact as much as anything drove CAMit to produce their own engines, but coming just as the US market for LSA aircraft was tanking due to the third class medical change, it was too little, too late and they not survive, and Jabiru lost their production facility and had to rebuild from scratch. The newly redesigned engine may prove good, but is still early. The Jabiru folks do seem to be paying more attention to their customers and I hope they survive, but much of their problems could have been avoided.

Sonex are great aircraft. The Sonex company. like most small family run operations, does have its quirks, but is a good company, That they remain so and grow and evolve with the time and market is my reason for concern about increased activity by moderators and reason for my request that moderators use a light touch. Some posts may occasionally get far enough from aviation relevant information or be offensive enough to require editing or blocking, but it takes as much as much mental discipline to avoid over control as under.

David A. Sonex TD, CAMit 3300.

[chris]

A point for clarification:

We did not say that negative comments are not allowed.


I am going to lock this thread so that it does not distract from the purpose of the forum, which is discussion of the Sonex line of experimental aircraft.

All of your comments have been taken into serious consideration by myself and the moderators. Also, If you have additional concerns feel free to PM me or post in the "Suggestion" area of the forum.