No, they don’t owe me anything. I’m just saying it’s not a good way to run things. If you’re trying to get someone to stop doing something, do you tell them “hey, you violated this rule recently” or do you tell them “hey, please don’t do [this specific thing] if you want to stay a part of this community, it violates the rules”. You can’t learn and correct bad behavior if you don’t know what exactly was wrong with your behavior.
In this case, palmercr knew. But what about them case where the person doesn’t know?
This is the thing. We don’t know if he was banned for this. We’re all assuming this is the reason, and it’s a pretty safe bet. But we don’t know. And that’s a precedent I’m not okay with when it comes to banning. If someone is getting banned, I want the person doing the banning to have a good reason.
But hey, like was said above, do they owe us anything? No. I’m just not sure I want to be a part of a community that allows bans to occur without written reason
Sometimes though it’s not the severity of the act or how much impact it has overall, it’s about being asked not to do something and then you intentionally do it anyway.
But, shouldn’t it be about the severity of the act?
Otherwise, to me, it seems arbitrary and capricious.
I mean, the very information that is supposedly such a threat to Glowforge’s intellectual property still persists in their own forum. So, obviously it can’t be that much of a concern to them.
Which leaves us with this question: Is it the message, or the messenger? Especially given that others (including myself) have delivered the same message and suffered no consequences. Not even a “Please don’t say that”.
I think we have a fair bit of speculation here, and If i were in GFs shoes I wouldn’t comment further. What I’m saying is that I bet we don’t have the whole picture, so I’m not going to judge.
The only communication between @palmercr and Glowforge about either ban was a single email informing him of the permanent ban he received today. That’s it. The first ban he only learned about when his login was denied.
Whatever else there is to the story from Glowforge’s side, you’re right - we’ll never know.
You’re absolutely right and if this was a first offense, it would be extremely unfair for GF to ban someone for such an offense. I can’t speculate as to why other similar comments went unchecked in the past. If I had to guess, it’s about the intent at the time the information was shared. In this specific instance though there’s no claiming it’s arbitrary and unfair when someone publicly says they know sharing specific information is not allowed, and they do it anyway.
Seems to me with this post they are putting everyone on notice now. They are asking people to play on their forum by their rules. I actually think they have been pretty liberal with the info they allowed to be shared here. I have been happily surprised that so much of your information and deconstruction of the GF has been allowed. It’s an amazing resource for us and it seems like GF has seen it that way too. What a shame that something so trivial and silly may lead to a tightening of it. Palmer could have easily shared the info privately, but he chose to taunt GF publicly with it. I can’t blame them for reacting.
If you feel it’s something you need to do and it’s too restrictive, I understand your choice. It’s a damn shame and your input will be a great loss to the forum. We have learned a lot from you and I hope you continue sharing your information elsewhere.
Ditto. I think I bought a Glowforge in the first hour they went on sale. I’ve spent a lot of time on this forum, and like to think I’ve contributed my fair share to the community and am not a troll.
But I can no longer in good conscience participate here as it would be a tacit endorsement of bad behavior on the part of the management. I’ll miss most of you.
Given that the only way to get on this forum is to pony up thousands of dollars to Glowforge, I am not entirely comfortable with that sentiment. It isn’t Reddit.
It is reasonable to have rules, but the presumed offense seems like pretty weak tea. Search the forum for Doctor Who or Star Trek or any other cultural property and you’ll come up with lots of posts from people showing “a print that [they] created that… infringe[s] someone else’s intellectual property”.
Can’t believe I’m going to do this, because I really don’t want to get into the middle of it…
In my opinion, Glowforge is not attempting to protect their property rights, they are protecting ours.
If information is disseminated widely on how to circumvent the controls in place in the Catalog, designers are not going to want to put their designs up for sale there. There would be nothing to prevent someone from purchasing a single use license and then making as many of the items as they wanted to for friends, family and for resale. It is theft from the designers.
That might not matter to some of you who know how to design your own files, but for the bulk of the customers that haven’t achieved that skill level yet, posting that information at the very least is going to reduce the number of choices that they have. It’s going to reduce the number of choices that you have. It’s not going to attract designers to sell through the Catalog. I believe (hope, really) that Glowforge ultimately wants to attract the best designers and bring the best work into one conveniently accessed location instead of making machine users waste time searching the internet for designs, and they want to make the laser an accessible tool for everyone to use, not just us techno-geeks. Kind of like a Thingiverse or a Silhouette Catalog for laser files.
So they take it seriously. It shows up in the Terms of Service and the Forum Guidelines. We get frequent warnings about it from staff on the forum. They will warn someone who accidentally transgresses, but they apparently will take action if those individuals continue to do it after they have been warned. That’s the bottom line.
I believe that everyone has the right to do what they want to do concerning their own forum participation, but I would recommend that everyone just take a breath and maybe re-think it before deciding what they are going to do. It would be a shame to lose some of the talent here.
I also believe strongly that for the sake of all of the customers and not just a handful, we need to follow their rules. They aren’t asking for anything we are not capable of doing.
I appreciate your calm and level headed answer in the midst of this.
I just don’t agree that they actually are protecting our IP by leaving such a large security hole and trying to shut people up who point out that they have no real security around sold designs.
Whatever the case here, whatever reasons his account was cut, now that it’s being tried in the court of public opinion it’s much harder for GF to change the decision, if they ever would have considered it.
I’m completely unsurprised that Palmercr made a ruckus; it’s what he did in nearly every thread I ever saw him in. This time it may have made a bad situation worse. The forum will continue on, this will quickly pass.
