On Elektron’s policy on third party firmware [No Links/Promotion]

[ripsaw]

@Kegeratorz

Elektron made their stance clear, yet this thread exists on their forum to argue with them.

The stance states that:

@Elektron

General discussion around the topic is one thing, and not something we seek to inhibit, but we draw the line at distributing actionable material or actively encouraging people to install modifications that could damage their machines.

This leaves the modorators in a bind. Do they allow “general” discussion of this which will inevitably lead to people sharing positive opinions on the topic that could be seen as “actively encouraging people to install modifications”

I attempted to suggest an alternative in a comment I made up thread:

@ripsaw

If the talk of unofficial mods is too much the rules should be changed:

1. Only allow talk about features present in official firmware.
2. Purge the threads where users ask for new features and ban the creation of new threads on the subject.

Otherwise admins, and other users, will run into the issue that user suggests X (or strait up shows a video of X) where X is something that custom firmware can already do and everyone is having to pretend they don’t know about it or talk around the subject.

I do not see any other way forward.

any animosity that is being generated by this thread is as direct result from that unclear ruling on what can and cannot be discussed. There is not a bright line. The fact that there is so much argument about this shows that there is not a bright line.

Edit: as this will be reviewed I’d like to add some more thoughts here. There needs to be a strict definition of what “actively encouraging people to install modifications” means.

I think we can break this down into several tiers:

1. directly linking to a mod - I feel this is easily against the statement.
2. mentioning a mod by name - It is currently unclear if this falls into the bucket of “encouraging” others to go seek out the mod. Does the fact that they need to find it themselves remove the “actively" modifier? Either way this needs to be made clear.
3. talking about aspects/features that are possible now due to modding but not naming a specific mod - This is about as far removed as you can get without banning the topic outright. Some will still want this to be banned but depending on the ruling on “General discussion” they could be the ones in the wrong for doing so. This would go against the Elektron statement of “General discussion around the topic is one thing, and not something we seek to inhibit” as I feel that should extend to forum etiquette too, “General discussion” being allowed means nothing if any time it happens it gets mass flagged and cannot be seen anyway.
4. Allowing the discussion as “3” but strictly segmenting it into it’s own thread, potentially per device, potentially a single thread, the same way that “Feature requests” are to prevent it from cluttering up the forum and provide a single place for people to discuss/ignore depending on their feelings on the topic. These are described elsewhere as “containment threads” for a reason.
5. Not allowing discussion of features not already in released firmware for that specific device - This is clean and unambiguous as it gets. As stated above this would require the removal of “feature request” threads to not provide additional stress to moderators as this will only open the door for people to talk around the issue.