Australian Cycling Forums - Bicycles Network Australia

Thanks for the followups.

On the free-speech, in the context of the forum the difficulty is not wanting opinions and welcoming discussion on tougher topics rather the question of responsibility and liability for defamation, taboo, etc comments. Secondly, managing the discussion becomes an unforgiving chore because people get upset and threats fly in every direction. With this in mind, the discussion forum has a framework with some limitations (topics and tone) with the underlying idea that if it is bike related, even if it is a dividing topics, as long as the discussion is respectful and civil then we try to accommodate.


Mikebytes commented on bing. Yahoo was also very naughty and because this site has a lot of pages and their crawlers were not very kind, it was essentially a massive load that blocked all the genuine viewers and at times knocked the site offline. I put in the work to try and limit them though they wouldn't follow their own rules (e.g. how many pages they access per second) so in the end I spent ages trying to get through and getting them to remove bna. The funny thing is, even though it is removed, they keep adding it again and the site gets hit from time to time.


Cheers
Christopher

AUbicycles wrote:
On the free-speech, in the context of the forum the difficulty is not wanting opinions and welcoming discussion on tougher topics rather the question of responsibility and liability for defamation, taboo, etc comments. Secondly, managing the discussion becomes an unforgiving chore because people get upset and threats fly in every direction. With this in mind, the discussion forum has a framework with some limitations (topics and tone) with the underlying idea that if it is bike related, even if it is a dividing topics, as long as the discussion is respectful and civil then we try to accommodate.

Christopher

I was trying to give Google a (well-deserved) spray with my free speech remarks. If you felt I was being critical of the forum or its moderators, please accept my apology. That was never my intention. I think you do a good job setting and maintaining standards of debate whilst still allowing people their say. The discussion on certain threads, such as MHL, is often very willing, while managing to remain just the right side of the line, and, as a consequence, makes for fascinating reading. The various protagonists are clearly not offended by it as they keep coming back for more.

It is a regular topic and every year or two I make a post about it but don't feel I have taken your post the wrong way... just an opportunity.

With the big tech companies, Google and the "do no evil" mantra was a good start for them but they certainly have long since moved beyond this. While they are ubiquitous and have also been fairly important for this site, they have the same dilemmas as many others in growth and expansion with regard to being genuinely customer centric and operating ethically. However MSN backed bing and particularly facebook can be criticised more heavily.

There's Malware going around that redirects your browser to Bing and its pretty good at hiding on your computer. The author(s) are cashing in on getting $ from Bing for the referrals. While this is technically not Bing's doing it is clearly another example of where Bing could be doing more to be a proper player, in this case put up processes to stop these Malware writers from profiting from Bing