Reasons for suspension of the official SDRplay Community Forum

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sdrplay
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Joined: Wed Jan 07, 2015 7:58 am

Reasons for suspension of the official SDRplay Community Forum

Post by sdrplay » Fri Sep 20, 2019 12:02 pm

The administration of an official SDRplay Community forum always represented a significant commitment in terms of time and resource, but was something that as a company we were happy to do as a service to our growing customer base. As the company's user base has grown, one unfortunate side effect of this has been an enormous growth in the sheer number of spam posts and malicious attempts to gain access to the forum for the purpose of disrupting the smooth running of the group. The anti-bot measures that we had put in place, are unfortunately no defense against individuals or groups of individuals bombarding the forum moderators with at first glance seemingly credible posts with that were in fact simply 'copy and paste' posts from other forums. We have no doubt that there have been a significant number of targeted attempts to create maximum disruption and waste as much of the forum administrators' time as possible.

A few months ago, an unfortunate new dynamic came into the group where a series of technical disagreements descended into rancorous and highly inflammatory exchanges which damaged the tone and friendly culture of the group. As forum administrators as received a long series of complaints from all parties in these exchanges holding us ultimately responsible for the behaviour of others.

After each of these disagreeable episodes, the time and effort required to clean up the forum and attempt to restore order was substantial.

The behaviour of a small group of individuals, unfortunately forced into the difficult decision to change our moderation policy to prevent such exchanges from occurring again in the future.

Our intent had always been to relax these new procedures at some point in the future once a good period of calm had passed, but instead of simply accepting our decision, some people chose instead to try to have the moderation rules changed in a way that they deemed to be appropriate and acceptable. A range of posts appeared and private messages sent accusing the moderators of 'disgusting' behaviour, 'censorship' and of treating people like' criminals'. In addition a number of private messages were sent accusing us of incompetence for allowing the 'bad guys to win'.

The sheer amount of time that dealing with all of this was taking was starting to impact our ability to deliver other critically important services to our customers such as providing first class and timely technical support. Given this latter and most important point and that there are many other SDR forums available to users, including an excellent independently run Facebook group with over 11,000 members, we reluctantly concluded that maintaining an official SDRplay Community forum was no longer justifiable.

This forum is now permanently suspended and will no longer accept new posts or allow new users to register. However, the content of the forum will remain in place as a searchable resource and knowledge base for all past and present SDRplay customers.

SDRplay Support Team

Reason: No reason

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