The sudden* and permanent** banning of prominent Forum members certainly lets a lot of hot air out of the balloon, doesn’t it? At this rate, there will be another one in July, another in August… and why is it always from the top of the Leaderboard?
It’s like the captors’ commandant having your platoon leader shot as a way of keeping the rest of the POW’s in line. Over the top and certainly uncalled for! So much easier and humane to revoke someone’s posting privileges for a day or week, or simply remove their offending post(s), than to banish them for 1000 years, no?
I suggest the latter approach would have a far less chilling effect on the rest of us Forum members.
* “sudden” as in “surprise”, “no public forewarning”, “unexpected”, “seemingly wonton”, “bizarre”
** “permanent” as in “lifetime”, “goodbye forever”, “no offer of reinstatement”, “zero second chances”
The fact of the matter is that we’re all guilty because we let it slide (some post on a thread unfortunately mean nothing, I’m sorry to say it).
Rafale got banned, some fuss on the forum, no reaction, things move on.
Catman got sacked, some fuss on the forum, no reaction, things move on.
So the conclusion is that we’re ok with it.
Post keep pooring, free advice for a company that doesn’t really seem to know where to go with the product continues (see here the example of: now - everything is local and amazing, previosly - release atom with no offline capability and hardware that was not even capable of doing offline, as Rafale clearly and perfectly identified and got banned for).
Actions need reactions.
Most of you, including the banned ones, are responsible for Vera even still beeing on the market.
That’s why I and a lot have walked. I am down to 3 more people changing over to different systems & I won’t need to be checking in to the forum anymore either.
rig papa, I just wanted to let you know how much I admired your comment. I also wanted to let you know that am going to use it as an inspiration for some communications that I need to have with others in my life. I appreciate your work and and I try to fully appreciate how much better you have made my vera experience.
It all speaks to how a company sees their old hardware and their customer base.
Are projects to keep deprecated devices running a source of lost sales or are they value-adds? Is a project that slaves VeraLO controllers to HomeSeer/HomeAssistant/ApplicationX an opportunity to onboard new customers or an exit path for existing customers?
Actions say “lost sales/exit path” are the justification.
I don’t believe it’s the right way to prevent losses during this transition window. The internet is more than able to let people find alternatives and good will is hard to earn.
But it’s not our company. We don’t get to decide the policies.
We just decide if this is a vendor we want to rely on.
I do not know if banning people is a good path. From my point of view i can only say that before Rafale’s ban I was reading this forum regularly almoste every day. Now I came to see if something is getting better once or twice a month…
But the whole thing is missing that those users have been complaining about the development and couldn’t find any other solution than migrating to other platforms.
I’m not expecting anithing more from my Vera Plus that I bought at the beginnig of my home automation juorney with the hope to have one single device “to rule them all”: z-wave, zigbee, wifi and bluetooth. But I realized very soon that zigbee integration was useless for me living in EU, bluetooth was retired and zwave had several problems. It let me think that those protocols were not standard enought, that might be partially true, but there are other solutions that seems to be more compatible.
Now my Vera Plus is acting as a zwave bridge, thanx to the excellent integration with Home Assistant, where I put all the logic with NodeRed (am I going to be banned too?)
After 2 years, the Ezlo acquisition is still myterious to me: they couldn’t fully fix the old vera products, so they started a new one that is not a valid replacement for the old one (due to API, plugins, etc), and banning people seems to me a fast path for loosing some of the user base…
Vera as bridge under home assistant with node red rules! And the QT openzwave integration is a swift migration path out of misery. (Am I going to be banned?). Vera is still in my domotica but getting less and less to do as an automator. Today I deleted 2 out of 8 PLEG and migrated to node red. I also uninstalled veraalerts and have that done with node red and the telegram bot. Instant message with photo, value, response, nothing is too hard.
Back to topic. If it wasn’t to the lack of device (zwave) support of vera I think I would have never searched for a replacement. But now I have found one I am also grateful to vera for giving me the opportunity to use other products than Vera.
after I migrated all my troublesome devices to openzwave I still have a lot of my “working” devices on vera, just as a zwave bridge. I would really have hoped that would have stayed and device support was expanded for Vera.
But hey, I am off topic again . Think it’s because I am back into “fun” again with home automation and my new “octopus” homeassistant. (Hope I will not be banned, well I do not refer to competitor websites at least).
Really hope for that promised final Vera firmware making things more stable…
I am just about to investigate the parts of your solution and to see what I can do with node red. It seems that this solution would depend upon the bridging capability remaining. Is there any way that very could decide to remove that capability?
Presuming you mean with “bridging” the integration: Vera - Home Assistant.
No this will remain working unless Vera removes this from their firmware but I highly doubt this since it’s the core capability since begin.
Edit: and since there will be probably no more firmware updates I would not worry
I agree with the general sentiment here. I think this forum has lost two valuable contributors in Catman and Rafael, and ultimately this diminishes the value of the forum to all of us. Banning outspoken but very knowledgeable contributors like the aforementioned is a pathetic way to handle the listed issues with those two. We not only lose their voices, but it also tends to muffle the remaining voices and contributes to the downward spiral of this forum. And it ultimately drives many of us away from Ezlo’s products for the future.
Quite unbelievably, even the venerable @akbooer just got suspended from the Forum for a snappy comment he made the other day in response to someone’s question about Vera EOL.
I’ve yet to ask him whether he received “multiple warnings” or was somehow deemed guilty of “continuing behavior” that resulted in this administrative decision. Whichever the case, I personally never witnessed him causing disruption in the community.
Indeed, his input over the last 9 years as one of our Top Five contributors has been among the most helpful in my opinion, not to mention always learned and highly professional, so I hope his account gets reinstated quickly!!
UPDATE: As stated below, the alleged offense involves driving traffic to another (presumably a competitor’s?) website. Having reviewed all of @akbooer’s recent posts, I witnessed no such thing, so must assume the purported activity was happening behind the scenes somehow.
Once again we have another contributing and talented member of the forum banned for such a small comment that was honestly really funny. I have not seen him make any other comments that would earn him a strike. I just find it ironic how it’s said that Vera isn’t EOL but banning these type of veteran members will surely force it to be EOL since there’ll eventually be no more talented forum members left.
Edit: I see that he was suspended? It doesn’t show anything on his account, nevertheless its unnecessary
That is incorrect.
He was using this forum and its users to drive traffic to some other third party forums. Its spamming.
We were provided evidence of that.
Sorry but I fail to see how their 100% DIY project is in any shape or form competition for Ezlo. That are not users you should be worrying about and is not your target market IMO. These are people that have out grew Vera and Ezlo is not providing a replacement, nor should you aim for that. If you have a look at the smarthome.community forum you will see that it is a few ex-Vera users that are pushing all kinds of technologies they happen to need to the limit. Doing that they are building knowledge that (some) people here could benefit from. That they use that knowledge to highlight weaknesses in the Vera/Ezlo platforms is to me a plus and so should it be to you. Just too bad that you are blocking them from sharing their knowledge and providing their free(!) support to many. Yes, a few others may decide to give that DIY route a try, the majority will stay with a out of the box solution that Ezlo is one of. Those out of the box solutions are your competition and you should worry about the pace their environments are developing.
I agree, its not competition, still doesn’t excuse the behavior of abusing our forums and breaking our forum rules. The intent and the abuse is what matters.
At this rate, there will be another one in July, another in August… and why is it always from the top of the Leaderboard?
. Think it’s because I am back into “fun” again with home automation and my new “octopus” homeassistant. (Hope I will not be banned, well I do not refer to competitor websites at least).