CharlotteTheHarlot wrote:...Aside from the stuff I was told behind the scenes in confidence, these quotes constitute the entire "official" word of what happened there. It is very disappointing because they are both decent guys from what I can tell ( particularly dencorso who is definitely one of the good guys who came up "from the streets" so to speak and has real skillz particularly in the esoteric Win9x universe ). Thus it is disheartening to read these bureaucratic responses to genuine concerns. IMHO, clearly some anonymous cowardly Softie got his panties stuck in his vagina and needlessly caused some ruckus behind the scenes there. I especially detest that deflection of stating that the thread was 'only being moved' when in reality it was killed, and then later resuscitated due to the perseverance of all interested parties.
It is at the very least a soft censorship although the original goal was undoubtedly pure hard censorship ( 'they took a vote' ) by whoever that original "snake in the grass" over there may be. If that person wasn't such a panty-wearing little girl he would have the courage to self-identify himself somewhere, maybe here or at MSFN, and proudly proclaim their actions of trying to muffle dissent against the MicroBorg Windows 8 walled-garden empire. So come on out of the shadows, coward! At least over here we can go mano-a-mano without censorship or offended sensibilities. Bring it, homey.
It is really painful to review these facts because in my opinion MSFN is so much larger than any of her members and especially her "staff". I can't criticize it. There are incredible amounts of information and projects blowing apart all the so-called limits that MicroCorp arbitraily set for Win9x and other operating systems while pursuing their cynical planned obsolescence. That place is made by its contributing posters, not its "staff". Speaking for myself, I'm only there to help people whenever I can, for free, in my ever vanishingly small spare time. That particular "Deeper Impressions" thread concerning Windows 8 falls right in the same vein because we are literally trying to save Microsoft from itself.
We shall be redeemed in due time.
You know, that remark you said about the Sword of Damocles hanging over threads was so true. It is a kind of, as you so well put it "soft censorship". Political in nature I suppose. Beside the fact that generally I detest thread locking, they knew exactly that doing so even temporarily would kill all the enthusiasm when everyone would see the Sword of Damocles is hanging there.
I could never in my wildest dream have imagined they would lock that thread frankly. It brought them customers, paying mind you (me for example) and it was bringing a little life into an almost dead MSFN but I'm with you on this, someone did something. This was no accident.
At first, I was going to cache that entire thread but I changed my mind because it would take almost 14 days, 8 hours of work each day to do so and on top of it, I think it is better that we create new and original content in here instead of just copying a dead thread.
New and original content will have a much more punch power in here because they will not be able to shut this place down. OK, sure, everyone has their price. I'm not pretending I don't have a price... but my price is not a few bucks... or a scary letter from someone. My price is VERY high. To shut this place down, they would have to spend a LOT of money, I'm talking six figure numbers, so I can safely say, everything we talk about here is safe from deletion.
