After another long time user gets banned for spam/ posting competitor, are all help forums that talk about smart home considerd competitors.
I am asking as i don’t wish to be banned, and i have linked to other forums in the past.
@catman banned for 1000 years.
Haven’t read the forum in some time as I was busy moving 2 of my locations to Hubitat.
I now only have 1 single vera, and had issues yesterday, as remote connection didn’t work, again… so I decided to see what’s up on the forum and then saw this: another high-level user banned. And I am not surprised.
The direction of the new management seems pretty clear:
I think if should be an eye opener for anyone that does any work indirectly for them (@reneboer , @akbooer e.g. ezlo-bridge), because in turn, you are contributing, while with all good intentions to this… i don’t find a good word for it.
Ps. Seeing some of the leader posts and bans I can’t help to think how they treet their employees if this is how the forum is managed.
Yeah that’s not good. Maybe I will be next… 
Catman was a regular contributor to the forums…
We understand some of the debates can get heated and we encourage freedom of speech, but we expect our members to treat others with respect and courtesy. We will not tolerate the following…
Below are examples of prohibited non-constructive posts:
Do not post advertisements for other companies
Advertising of any kind for direct competitor companies on these forums is strictly prohibited.
My time is not to be bought by anyone. Ezlo bridge is not my plugin, either.
I will concede, perhaps, that my development of openLuup has, counter-intuitively, done its small part in keeping some Vera users around for longer than they might have been. But it was originally conceived out of frustration with Vera’s shortcomings, and now, perhaps, is of no interest to Ezlo (aside from the existence proof that it would have been possible to re-engineer Vera, to make it reliable, and also to provide an incremental pathway to an object-oriented API, all the while retaining existing plugins.
So openLuup has its own life, now, particularly with bridges to other hardware (ZWay, also Ezlo couretsy of @reneboer) and if you want to follow that up, there is at least one other forum where you can find active users.
From this 90% of posts on this forum are spam.
No, no. Since this forum is a Vera/Ezlo site, then nothing here can be “spam”.
so anything published on this forum is not spam? I’m confused. So how can you get banned for spam if you post on this website? As it’s posted here as you say it can not be spam.
I’m just trying to interpret the rules according to the letter (rather than the spirit?) 
I just want clarification as to what is spam, can i link to node-red forum or an interesting topic on amazon alexa.
I understand that it would be bad form to link to the selling page of a competitor, but what about a article that has interest for all.
If i accidently link to a site Ezlo consider spam do i get a warning, or do i just get the 1000 year ban?
Hi,
Like AK I am not in any way working for or related to Ezlo. The only reason I think the Ezlo bridge is a good idea because nearly all my plugins run on openLuup so the Vera’s can do zwave only. I think the Ezlo devices could have better zwave then Vera, but at the same time it will take a long time before it will have the functions I need (i.e. the origin is selfish). So the bridge makes sense for me and others are free to use it or not. I think it will provide a path to slowly migrate from Vera to Ezlo that many of us are looking for, or a way to keep using that ‘old’ plugin critical for you but no longer maintained.
I strongly object against banning contributors to this forum as long as they are not using offensive or discriminatory langue. A company like Ezlo should be mature enough to allow critical voices and references to competing products. We do not need this forum to find them, so why would it matter?
Cheers Rene
Might have been a language barrier from my side.
I wss not saying you guys work for ezlo, that was clear, I was just saying that by your good work and intentions you might be indirectly helping a company that doesn’t really seem to appreciate it.
Anyway, it was more of a philosophical point.
I always wondered if Vera woudn’t have died years ago if plugins weren’t written by others.
I wouldn’t have bought it without PLEG, it was what made it work for me.
Anyway, i don’t want to go outside the topic, just wanted to clarify, your Vera work is highly appreciated guys.
I would not know what I would do without Reactor!
I would of left Vera many years ago if it wasn’t for PLEG a 3rd party logic engine plugin.
A ban for spam or linking without multiple warnings would be a draconian response that I would view as a reprehensible breach. I don’t know if @catman received warnings prior, but I think he’s smart enough to heed such warnings for the mutual benefit of his ongoing contribution here, so I have my (admittedly uninformed) opinion/suspicions about how this went down. And I’m beyond disappointed, not that that matters at all.
Particularly these days, where tensions are horribly high all over the world, driven by fear of both the known and the unknown, the dangers present and the possible, we must all work extra hard at taking a breath before we act. For those of us here in the US, open communication and the full freedom to communicate ideas both agreed and disagreed, at one time fundamental to our culture, has given way to mindless screaming and an anonymous cancel culture punishing “wrong think.” The sudden bans on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms of dissenting voices may momentarily placate angry mobs deaf to ideas outside their narrative, but serve only to widen the divide, embitter contributors, and perhaps worst, force the bad ideas into the dark, musty corners where they breed and spread, rather than into sunlight where they are exposed and die in a flash of reason. All of this creates even more demand to apply more moderation and reason into every interaction; regardless of warnings, and I think this ban fails at that.
And if this event is indicative of the kind of future we can expect from eZLO, it does not support the outward opinions of upcoming product we are being served. If the products are as great as we are being told, they will stand up to scrutiny of any kind. They will go toe-to-toe fearlessly with any competitor now or in the future. They will take criticism from customers (and developers) as opportunities to make their products even stronger, not fall back on TOS and banish the (hopefully) hundreds of thousands or millions of voices that will tell them honestly and enthusiastically what it takes to make their product great. I mean really, customers pay you to tell you how to make your products better. Actions like this never reflect positively on the company in any way, or on the products. Yes, there can be troublesome users who create real problems, but these forums have a long history of comparing and discussing the merits and failures of other products (linked), so this seems a recent change in enforcement, if not in terms. Regardless, I think a ban for something that minor reflects poorly on both product and company. For a developer faced with the substantial task of total rewrites of 15 plugins for a completely new, largely undocumented and untested platform, that’s an uncomfortable position to be put in.
I don’t know what Catman has meant to have done? I’ve never seen him post “spam”.
In fact Catman from what I have seen him post was a helpful forum member giving advice and tips to other users.
Spam is information or links that are off topic, not relavent to the thread discussion.
I have removed some links off this forum myself when it’s blatantly obvious some one has posted a dubious looking link.
However I fail to see if the conversion is on topic, even if we are talking about other Home Automation hubs how that is Spam?
links for Viagra is spam links to phishing sites is spam, information about a Nigerian prince offering some get rich scheme is spam.
Direct links to a competitors sales page is probably not what you should be linking too. However only this week I mentioned other hubs to someone Fibaro HC3, Smartthings and Hubitat, so was that spam?
It’s rediculous banning members who have contributed greatly to the forum and the collective knowledge base.
I dont recall these issues on the old forum with people getting banned.
Yes if some one is a persistent trouble maker and has had all his warnings and not listened and has made serious breaches of the forum rules then they should go.
But all this makes me nervous who is next to get banned for very little reason?
I admit I don’t know what went on with Catman but I am surprised he has been banned.
Might have to look at his recent posts see what may have happened?
he was banned for the following reason:
He was advocating people to move away from Vera and inviting them to join another forum by posting those links.
I think maybe the larger question is why would people advocate to go elsewhere in the first place.
(as I sit here with Alexa telling me "the hub XYZ is connected to is not responding)
How many times did he do this and did Ezlo give him any warnings?
So is it a one strike and you are out and banned?
Or was it persistent behaviour?
Are users given warnings first?
I have never linked to other competitors forums but I think most of us here have talked about other hubs out there on the market place at one time or another.
You cannot constructively critique anything without making comparisons, so mentioning competing products is inevitable.
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