Brian's last message suggest that he may be taking his ball and going home.......let's reflect on how this all could have gone down.

Instead of just barging into LQ with a request for people to come to his new site, Brian could have simply joined and participated. At some point, he could put the link to his site in his sig. (As many members here have done.) We would then never have had this stimulating and inspiring thread.........;)

The message is simple (Brian--are you there?): The primary intent of the original post was not to join the community, but simply to promote the competing site--THAT is why we reacted.

True and most people don't have a plan or don't know what's involved. This isn't about that alone though: as LQ has grown a lot of people think LQ makes for a nice target to leech an audience or drive traffic to their web log / site / whateverelse, which is clearly evidenced by a near-zero TTL between signing up for a LQ membership and the initial ad post(s), often combined with a combative attitude and a lack of reciprosity. It is characteristic they do not (want to) see that "free advertising" over the back of what the LQ Community has achieved in these years is not acceptable.

I remember one exception (years ago) about a Linux + music + composers forum. As it AFAIK already was an established community of sorts, having no overlap with what LQ does and LQ not wanting to compete in such a niche market anyway, that was the type of exception that I could agree with (and would even have helped promoting provided I had remembered the URI ;-p).

Funny you replied with such a 'threat' as leaving this thread open does not hurt me or my ideas one bit, in fact, it will show a couple of interesting things.

1. YOU DID ARGREE on 'certain terms' which means you know your partially wrong on certain things you said.

2. This is your board, not mine, and besides, I am only in the 'setup' stages of my site now, so there might be changes in names / ip's / or the idea in general.

3. Your site will remain...

4. Things left unsaid.

Let me be bet, you will *lock* this won't you? Funny how sysadmin all think the same, that's why I STAND OUT. I *think* differently.

You really are making more of this than there is. This thread has been left open not as a "punishment" or "threat" but because we try to avoid closing threads unless there is no other option. I will say that when you come to moderate your new board, you will realise that moderation decisions really are taken for the good of the board and not because of power plays or similar.

I wish you the best of luck with your board.

Ok,

Fair enough. I won't post here any more and you may do as you wish my account on this board (delete it, block ip, whatever), as I will not be coming back here to reply to any more posts as it is a waste of time to me. On that note, I want mutual respect as I do not wish to receive any more emails from this site in my mailbox.

take care

Brian,

It's unfortunate that this thread has degenerated to its present state, and that you have decided to leave LQ. Should you change your mind, your account will be as you left it; we don't block IP's nor delete accounts, and even if we did, it certainly wouldn't be because of a difference of views/opinions between members and Moderators.

Before you leave, please check your profile email settings, to ensure you are not sent community bulletins, birthday wishes, or any other emails, if you do not wish to receive any.

Kind regards,
Sasha

for about 90% of the people here a ban would be meaningless <lets' not give 'em any ideas eh?>

no I seriously doubt you will be baned even if you repeat this mistack

you can get what you want from here you just have to pay for it
and I don't blame them one little bit for not giving you for free what others pay them for

Hey Rob, I removed your circumvention advice: people who need it should already know it and no one else needs to be given ideas :)

We rarely ban people, you have to be waaaay out of line to get banned and, in many cases we give people many chances before dropping the ban hammer.

And we make people pay the princely sum of 0USD to be a member here and to get/give advice. It's against basic netiquette to join our community with the sole aim of borrowing our members for other sites. But as I said above, my questions were asked honestly and with no ulterior motives.

I didn't think I was giving circumvention advice some things are so obvious that it didn't seem to me like circumvention advice in fact I was even careful not to use words that could have given clues as to how to

It's no big deal, we do have some people with parachute accounts and it's not something we want to publicise as an option.