we are now at discussing definition of “civil” and “Professional” and what these words mean to each person’s brain etc. Its becoming a very subjective topic and difficult to answer to, apart from saying, everyone is entitled to their opinion. Everyone’s interpretation of these concepts are not necessarily the same.
Some interesting User statistics to consider…
Of the mere 45 members posting over 1000 replies since 2009, 27 essentially stopped participating before the new Forum began (did the MCV acquisition happen in 2017?).
Of the remaining 18 “power contributors”, 1 is a company employee and 5 to date (catman, rafale77, slelieveld, akbooer, pabla, along with kfxo, matsohl) have been unceremoniously deactivated or, worse, permanently banned with no chance of reinstatement.
That leaves 12 of us die-hard volunteers, 6 of whom are still active Developers along with 1 Beta tester. Out of 60,699 registered Users — no more than 2% of which ever logged on again after registering! — that’s a pretty slim slice.
No matter your perspective – be it business, PR, humanitarian, fairness, userbase, development, community-building, etc. – this really underscores the incalculable value of keeping Top Posters around, doesn’t it?
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Thank you for the advice, I truly appreciate it and I do put myself in their shoes. I am an active forum user here and other forums as well, I would not want to be banned either, thats why I respect their rules.
I guess some people are just better at comprehension than others.
Now can we just turn the page and move on as this forum is not really the place for some of these types of discussions.
I am sure that you as well as I have other things to do, you probably more so as you run your own company.
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@Tim88
Btw: Did akbooer ever try to steer/guide/propose (etc) you to other forums using our forum or know of him doing this to others?
He did not and I personally did not read any posts of his that may have done so. I had reached out to him in the past for support and suggestions on the Netatmo weather plugin he wrote for Vera. He was very responsive and helpful.
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Thank you for your honesty @Tim88
Here is what we can reveal, without revealing recipients information (multiple recipients have come forward with this, seems like a general post that starts with “hi there” with no personalization, he has been sending to our forum users)
Pure spam, attempt at stealing our users, by misleading them.
I hope you have permission to post that private PM. (If not please ban yourself as it breaks forum rules, and we know what rule breaking leads to.)
That looks like one PM to another member, with no other context. Are you saying he initiated that PM, or was it a response to another PM. Has he been sending that to all new and old members unsolicited? I don’t see one PM as Spam, please tell us how many people he sent that message to as an unsolicited spam/junk message. That PM is also from may 2020, why did you wait till now, or why did the Stool Pigeon wait till now.
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We were alerted recently
There are multiple of these, that have been brought to our attention. We do not know the scale of it. We are satisfied with these multiple evidence that it was a clear breach of forum rules.
Change the rules! Make it more lenient… I for one have found the top contributors’ contributions very valuable and if anything, it has not driven me away from the Vera ecosystem, but if anything, extended its usable life.
Sad to see them banned and without folks like them there is not much point visiting these forums. Without forums and a support base the Vera is just another HA system…
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Stealing the users you’ve said you don’t want and value? You have been that plain in saying that, Melih. And I don’t think it’s all at all misleading for anyone to say that Vera’s current firmware is EOL, when (a) you are writing replacement firmware, (b) no new devices have been released since 2018 except those that only run newer eZLO firmware, and (c) your Vera firmware release schedule has slowed to an even slower pace than ever before, and communication with respect to the firmware comes little and far between. I think that’s pretty good evidence that EOL is on the horizon.
You can say all you want about rules. Good or bad, if you apply them capriciously, and don’t give warnings or have some kind of an escalated disciplinary policy, the community is, I think, well within its right to balk at your conduct.
For the record, I think your decision is petty, and does more to speak to how defensive you are becoming around the progress of your work than any wrongdoing on @akbooer’s part. Keep in mind, his work, and that of others, is what is keeping these Vera customers on life support in your world. Most of these people would be long gone and you’d be in the position of selling to them all over again, if you could, because so many feel burned they would probably never give you a second chance, and this only affirms their thinking. In any case, the most expensive way to acquire a customer is to try to recover a lost one at your own hand. Keeping the customers you have is the cheapest way to find new business, I’m sure you know. Things like this just drive more people away. If I was an investor in your company, I’d be calling for your departure.
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It must be a coincidence that you “came up” with that multi controller idea, after we divulged our internal information about MESHENE to you (which does group controllers)
I was puzzled as to why you were reluctant to sign an NDA.
You first agreed to receive a payment for porting reactor to Ezlo, then all of a sudden you said you didn’t want to sign an NDA and didn’t want to talk to us anymore.
All this after we opened up our chat group to you and included you in it with our internal information and access to our internal engineers including MESHENE (which does grouping plus more!)
If I was your employer I would fire you!
Not sure why this topic was locked.
I think @rigpapa have a right to respond.
Melih, nice reach, but no. Multi-system Reactor was on my mind for some time well before we ever spoke, and the underpinnings of it have been running in my own home since 2017, when I made my first foray into getting off Vera and started using HomeAssistant, and was straddling both. Well before you were in the picture at all.
In fact, like many people, I tabled my plans to move away from Vera because of your arrival, and your promises, but now many years later the entire community is still waiting, and for many of us, confidence in your ability to produce has waned considerably, your reassurances and marketing-rah-rah notwithtanding.
I didn’t sign your contractor agreement because it would have given eZLO ownership rights of everything I produced or conceived, even if it had nothing to do with my work at eZLO, porting Reactor, etc., including all my existing plugins and related work conceived prior. The language was too broad, and I made several rounds of proposed changes to try to meet in the middle. Your team refused to budge on those terms, and there was no point in continuing the discussion as there would be no meeting of the minds. Did your team tell you that?
It’s all neither here nor there, as I would likely still be on the clock waiting for you to produce something I could actually build Reactor on. You didn’t do that, so I took what I already had and built on top of it, went my own way. Just like a lot of other customers are doing.
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Strange that you waited 4 years to launch your idea and it coincided with us revealing Meshene to you.
You must be a great liar, as you didn’t mention any of that when we were talking about paying you for migration well after my arrival!
I understand about the contract. I was talking about NDA not the Contract…You didn’t sign the NDA!
I even suggested I could “donate” that money to you (out of contract) because I wanted to reward your work.
Facts are our friends, and I have nothing to hide. Here is the communication with you:
Your statement of "
"
So disingenuous, that means you were lying to me all that time!!! Leading me on, with no intention to help, but happy to have access to our internal information. Very disturbed by your admission Patrick!
I am honestly not seeing how you are connecting facts here. Is it clear to you that when I talk about leaving, I’m referring to the 2017-2018 time frame? The straddling time frame?
I’m not sure how you’re getting what you’re getting out of the conversation, so much so that I have no idea what you’re getting at all. I was nothing but straight with you, and the text shows that. Your legal team wasn’t dealing fairly, and that broke the agreement between us. Maybe you should have a talk with them.
Everyone, please read every word I’ve written. There’s nothing there I’m not proud of. And clearly, I’m most proud of not getting myself entangled with this mess.
Edit: thanks for posting the extra image… this corroborates everything I said prior:
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You stopped in May 2020, you were not “waiting” Patrick, after you got access to our internal information.
We got you access to our developers and started sharing information…
then you stopped responding early May…with no explanation…after leading us on few days earlier that you will do the reactor I was going to donate $6k to you each month for 3 months ($18k). One day we are all in agreement about you doing the reactor and me donating to you, next day you stopped.(after we had given you access). responding…
Wed 6th you are happy
Wed 12th you stop responding…
I stopped responding because we didn’t have an agreement, and your product wasn’t ready. There was nothing for me to do. You didn’t give me access to anything you didn’t otherwise publish for a lot of others also on the group chat. Anything and everything I had was the same thing they got. Most of it was even published in this very community around the same time. You didn’t give me source code, you didn’t give me anything that could be considered IP, your team told me about function calls and parameters, published documents with (erroneous) lists of fields and data, etc., all of which documented the public APIs intended to be used for accessing the systems and building plugins.
For god’s sake, man, just admit that you misread my message in the heat of the moment. Most people know that when they find themselves in a hole, the best thing to do is to stop digging.
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Eh? One minute you say you don’t want the contract and agree to my donating without contract, next minute you say you stopped talking because you don’t have a contract?
You. Were. Not. Ready.
You. Had. Nothing.
Nothing. Worked.
Was I supposed to take your money anyway? Sorry, that’s not me.
Edit: By the way, you didn’t make a donation, did you?
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