dthurman said:I do think they have a tough game to control, they need to allow free exspression, but at the same time, they also need to control any negative posts towards their advertisers. Pretty thin and grey line there.
That is one thing that does bother me, the censorship sometimes is a large brush. Again I understand their position. I noticed just the other day that Bergie had posted a retort to some posts about the product reviews, and the "who is this Bergie fellow". If I am not mistaken, he was I think a little disturbed by the posts and ended up locking them and I would imagine delete them out over time.
I appreciate your views, just don't see it the same way. There have been lots of negative posts about MR's biggest advertisers (e.g., Walthers and Horizon), with not a hint of censorship.
The "who is this bergie" thread was from someone who clearly did not understand the forum. That thread is still active. Erik has not posted to it.
Erik was very clear why he locked the others. A poster had impugned the integrity of a member of the MR staff personally in an earlier thread (which was rightly removed) and then accused MR of a whitewash. Those two later threads, though locked, are still up for anyone to read. If they were going to be deleted as part of some dark conspiracy, they would have been by now, one thinks.
I think Erik rightly locked them to avoid a hissing match and encourage people to move on to more informative discussion.
I guess it's just my nature, I don't see a huge conspiracy behind every action Kalmbach takes. There are many threads critical of MR and many threads critical of MR advertisers. Though most have little value, they are allowed to continue ad nasueum, so I see no censorship at work. But, again, I may just be naive.
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Regards,
Byron