JasonC wrote:
You can’t enter the US in a GA plane under the visa waiver program.
Quite a few years ago (1997) my family and I entered the US using the VWP and we subsequently rented an airplane out of FXE and flew to the Bahamas…. On re-entry to the US the border protection guy did point out that we shouldn’t have done that! But that was pre-9/11 and I guess they were a bit more relaxed back then…
On the subject of Trump, I thought this was funny:
C210:
Peter first off the topic is politically involved
Yes I know the risk but that doesn’t mean you have to jump in and slag off politicians you didn’t vote for. That contributes zero information. I am 100% certain one can have a meaningful conversation without that, with intelligent people which is everybody here. I have such civilised conversations with many people I know, whose political views may be very different from mine. It is only on social media e.g. facebook where people nowadays just go crazy and slag each other off in the most disgusting way.
Yes I know this is a private forum and Peter controls it and we are his guests
That is a perverted view of reality.
It is a view which I know is held by certain former posters here who demanded totally free speech and left when they didn’t get it (notwithstanding their objections to them being ridiculed on and driven out by a lynch mob from a certain national “unmoderated” forum they also used to hang on, which drove them to EuroGA in the first place 
) and then starting a sh*tstorm of “anti-Peter” emails behind the scenes…
You cannot have free speech, simply because a small % of people will use the “freedom” to destroy the site. GA is really very tribal and lots of people have one favourite site and try to damage the others. For this and other reasons, most sites have strict rules – much stricter than we have. For example it is completely normal to get an instant ban on any disagreement with a mod and no comms entered into. For another dose of reality, have you tried posting something really controversial on one of the big US GA sites? You will be removed (kicked out) in hours. Those sites are quite clean because they have 24/7 paid mods and they clean up almost immediately, so most people don’t notice it.
Being a forum mod is often no fun but you need to grasp a bit of reality, which is that here you get way more democracy than just about anywhere else in GA. I am in the open and everybody knows where to find me. Only one person has been banned thus far, in 4 years and ~130k posts.
EuroGA is run as an informative site for GA. If somebody wants to beat people around the head, or express some bigoted political views, they can do it on any number of places on the internet, starting with facebook. And if someone thinks that e.g. it is too early to guess on changes to US policy on the subject header, they can just say that.
I co-run EuroGA with David and we have Guidelines which are really pretty simple. Being civilised is not rocket science! And everybody knows where the lines lie at making a purely political statement which is devoid of any info.
Now back to GA private flights with foreigners you need a special VISA called a B Visa and there are two types. It has to be of the type that is for non Business travelers. With it, the vetting you must go through is that you must show banking records that you have enough money not to become a ward of the State (political statement and has to be taken as such for the politically sensitive amongst the readers) or that you have a gainful occupation and therefore wont go there for economic reasons. (That is another political policy statement for the sensitive ones).
That is informative and not a problem to write. I too had to get the M1 visa and prove I have a house etc here in the UK.
Peter wrote:
That is a perverted view of reality.
Actually, that is legally correct as I had to point out to several people who have tried to influence or destroy forums I sysoped. And as such, the moderator/sysop team in cooperation with the owner will set forth policies which have to be kept. The fact is, if I ban somebody from a forum I own, I have all the right to do that and, more importantly, whoever I ban can not legally enforce me to let him back in. I sysop since the times of Compuserve and it never changed. Simply some people never understood this. The Internet is not a guarantee for free speech and free speech is not a licence to behave as one feels like. I think it is important to remember this from time to time. Especcially in today’s time where misinformation is as much a problem as following netiquette.
Well, yes, that’s right. What I was getting at is that saying “a site is somebody’s private site and they control what is said” (or similar) is a misrepresentation of reality which is that the site has perfectly reasonable guidelines and everybody with intelligence does actually know exactly what they can and cannot say before somebody has to do something about it.
Well the fact that I cannot look back and see what the offending post was I can not comment on how egregious that comment was. Im sure I was responding to someones post.
Peter wrote:
Following complaints, David and I decided to remove all the political postings from this thread.
With that said you forgot to take down Posts 10, 11, and 12
Peter wrote:
is a misrepresentation of reality which is that the site has perfectly reasonable guidelines
So its because of complaints you felt the need to remove the posts. Would you have done so if you had no complaints? I find the politically correctness police to be the source of lot of the problems. The sensitivities are turned up a little too high. For instance I remember one member making a God comment nothing out of the ordinary and nothing to do with a religious topic just mentioning God. I dont remember who but someone immediately swooped in to chastise them for bringing in religion into the Post. Personally I felt like telling that person to take a hike. Not because Im religious. My views on religion would definitely offend more than most so I dont express my views. Its this overly political correctness that I find troubling.
You know if there was only one post and that only post on the forum, I can see someone maybe making a stink. But considering there are dozens of posts to chose from, the sensitive one can, in my opinion, take himself/herself over to those other posts and not lose sleep over being offended. Unless of course they are losing sleep over the thought they might be offended in a post they have not seen and therefore to get a good night sleep they have to monitor all posts.
I belong to CPA and there are many times someone gets into a discussion outside of the basement (that is the place for politics and other divisive issues) because someone posts something that turns into a political discussion and as long as there are no personal attacks it runs its course. If they do get out of hand other members ask that they go into the basement and spar down there. So far as I can remember there was nothing that was posted here which would have asked anyone if done on the CPA site to remove themselves to the basement. I never remember John Frank or one of the moderators stepping in and deleting a post because of complaints. CPA as you know is a private site as well as paid for site. However its membership has more information than just access to a forum. So its not just a forum site.
Dont get me wrong I think this is a good site, its well run with lots of useful information that can be disseminated among pilots with good flying stories as well. Were it not for the political correctness police and the fact that a lot of people are in the shadows because their names are anonymous (whether true or fictitious) the forum and site would be even better.
Actually it kind of reminds me of certain children running over to their mommy pulling on her apron strings saying “mommy, mommy Billy/Sally (have to be politically correct and use male and female genders lest I am complained against) did such and such. Whaaa”.
C210_Flyer wrote:
a lot of people are in the shadows because their names are anonymous (whether true or fictitious) the forum and site would be even better
Oh the irony of seeing this posted by a user called C210_Flyer !! 
We have done poster anonymity to death on here, I post under my real name and many people have contacted me in “real life” but I fully understand why some prefer to be a little more circumspect, maybe for work reasons etc.
I think the balance of free speech vs censorship is about right on here, I suspect I’m like many others that read a lot more than they post and often find interesting and useful nuggets of information.
The thread got cleaned up not because of one specific post or one specific complaint but because it ran out of control, with people making increasingly out of line postings in response to each other.
I don’t like modding stuff because everybody here is very intelligent and they ought to know that eventually somebody is going to have to take action. At the risk of making a polical comment myself: if half of a country voted for somebody you call an idiot, you can expect some robust responses! So take that sort of discussion elsewhere, please, because it will get out of hand exponentially. This isn’t political correctness.
I also don’t like editing posts. So a post will be removed whole, or not at all, in most cases where something needs to be done. The only time I edit a post is when there is no risk to context, and usually it is to sort out trivia like referencing a duff URL which has since been fixed, etc.
Rest assured we do get a number of complaints which we disregard; they tend to come from “usual suspects”….
The main reason EuroGA is moderated is that it preserves the quality of the information posted. In online participation, the best info comes from a small % of participants. But it is easy to lose these “good people”. When “trash” starts to appear, they just pack up and leave and usually never come back. The reason they know good stuff in the first place is because they have a life and don’t sit on the internet all day. My overriding objective here is to get good people here and stop them leaving, and I do a fair bit behind the scenes towards that.
Also the lack of advertising avoids the need to allow “fighting threads” which boost traffic an order of magnitude.
I have never been to CPA (Cessna paid forum) but I have seen some awful personal stuff posted on COPA (Cirrus paid forum) which remained, apparently because it suited the mods’ agenda. If I did that here, or did here what has been done on certain other aviation sites, I would be lynched.
Re anonymity (Neil’s post above) this is absolutely necessary to get quality of postings, especially across many controversial topics which aviation is full of. Insistence on real names removes the majority of these immediately (as happened on one UK site which started to require full names) and exposes people to ridicule and outing. No forum is private, anyway, because anybody can join and read past posts.
When it comes to forums, David and I have been there, done it and got the T-shirts. I have seen most of them destroyed.
Peter wrote:
as happened on one UK site which started to require full names
That sounds particularly pointless. Unless they are going to demand a full vetting process, who is to say my name really isn’t – as an example – John Christian? If I’m forced to use such a place and don’t want to be easily identifiable, this is exactly what I do – use a pseudonym that looks like just a generic real name.
Unfortunately I was on rec.aviation.* when Robert Bass was trying to get people fired from their jobs for disagreeing with him, so I’d rather not make it trivial for that to happen to me.
That sounds particularly pointless. Unless they are going to demand a full vetting process, who is to say my name really isn’t – as an example – John Christian? If I’m forced to use such a place and don’t want to be easily identifiable, this is exactly what I do – use a pseudonym that looks like just a generic real name.
Yes, exactly, which is why many people on socata.org (full names required) use fake names.
The problem is when you have to pay for the membership. Compu$erve (and I am sure you were on there too ) tied credit card account names to usernames directly. Great recipe for all kinds of abuse…
Unfortunately I was on rec.aviation.* when Robert Bass was trying to get people fired from their jobs for disagreeing with him, so I’d rather not make it trivial for that to happen to me.
I know of similar serious cases… it does happen. I had one guy on C$ try to revoke my firm’s ISO9000 certification. Fortunately, we didn’t have one
