mmgreve wrote:
One thing I really like about the PPL/IR forum is that people use their real names and you know who you’re corresponding with.
I would like that as well. But only in a forum where everybody has to register in order to read the postings.
I guess many participants would take the title of this thread quite literally in the case you first had to pay before you could see if there are any worthwile posts. I don’t know any successful standalone forum that can work that way. If you become member of some organization which incidentally also has a forum, then maybe.
But regular visitors to EuroGA know Peter’s stance on the PPLIR policy of making people pay for some content in order to entice new members.
That being said, I support the suggestion of joining them to support their work, if you are remotely contemplating of maybe wanting to privately fly IFR in Europe some day.
Everything is a compromise.
Numerous forums push for real names, so a lot of people are there as “John Smith” or even (more imaginatively) as “John Habsheim”; probably “John Loctite” would be a bit obvious 
Lots of those in e.g. the Socata owners’ group, COPA, etc. Basically anybody with a profession/business via which they have an online presence which their customers can see and google-search and an unusual surname will be on these sites under a made-up surname IF they want to write anything of substance, especially with a regulatory undertone.
If you force the username to match the credit card account name (as e.g. Compuserve used to do, and PPL/IR does) then almost nobody will write anything of value, other than bland stuff and regulatory recitals/references. I was in PPL/IR for 10 years, until 2015, and have seen what went on there. Some really nasty characters were roaming around and beating people up – under real names. For years they allowed nicknames and there were some good posts about e.g. flight in icing. Then full names were instigated and somebody went through it and edited nicknames into full names. It was OK for a bit longer until a well known aviation business personality joined up, read past posts, and threatened to sue various people. After that, nobody wrote anything contentious. So a closed forum is worthless for confidentiality because anybody can join up and read past posts. It just took most people that big unpleasant event for that to sink in. Ultimately only about 40 people ever read that forum – against c. 1500/day here. So that’s the price you pay… you end up being an ever shrinking little club. Every year a load of people leave when they get the £75 renewal and you have to work to get replacements. For a forum, it is a useless formula.
In the USA – one country, one language, tons of GA, etc – the sites are 10x bigger and with advertising made possible, other stuff is possible. As I wrote here before, those sites have 24/7 paid mods which clean up anything really fast. People like the subject of this thread would be removed, together with any of their supporters, within the hour. I have seen it done All big sites have to run that way otherwise the mods would be bogged down by a very small number of individuals. BTW, the Beech site is free. There is a login.
Both David and I have been on aviation forums since their infancy and a lot of thought went into EuroGA and the way it should operate. We are always listening to suggestions, but presently I think the formula we have here is the best one which can be practically realised within the European pilot community.
tmo wrote:
Well, it might not get me any bonus point with you guys, but for what it’s worth, I’d be happy to see Alexis back and contributing…
Likewise. Welcome back, Alexis.
Jacko (who respectfully tenders this document as his pièce d’identité).
Thank you, Jacko!
You got 11 K pounds from the CAA … or you had to pay it?
Jacko stop gloating!
Peter I think this is a good decision. We have all fallen in to the trap of getting a little too tired and emotional over stuff written online. It is usually very sobering to meet people with whom you have done so who are usually perfectly normal and reasonable people.
I try to keep the following internet meme in mind.
They prosecuted me for hydroplaning, and then paid me for my legal expenses, travel, hotel accommodation, meals and a bottle of Chardonnay. It’s very rare for an English court to make such an award nowadays – a sign that the judge considers that the prosecution has been improperly brought.
In this particular case, I think the judge lost interest around the time that the CAA’s expert witness claimed, on oath, that he “couldn’t remember” whether anyone had told him what the rules are for expert witnesses. Or it could have been when the same expert admitted that he’d never flown a Maule, never practised the technique in question, and never attempted to talk to anyone who had.
We have all fallen in to the trap of getting a little too tired and emotional over stuff written online.
Jason – do you really want what we had here, with Prince Alexis pretending to be these different people? The story about “Dylan” being an American pilot is utter rubbish, BTW. And all the derogatory crap being emailed to people here in the background? I recall you were on the circulation list… Where do you want to draw the line on bogus posters?
And I will not tolerate offensive stuff being written or posted against me like we had in the past. Jesse got banned for that too and my patience for it is exactly zero. Some people just need a website on which to spurt out their 24/7 keyboard output. They can to do it on facebook or whatever.
Jacko – the reason you didn’t see the vast quantity of drivel was because I was deleting it for ages. Alexis was spurting it out all over the place like some kind of game.
Alexis – read post #24 above.
Well, I used to be on BT, thought it was pretty much the perfect forum. Full names. Until they got hit by quite a lot of trolls, one who even informed on the FAA about another pilot, which is pretty devious. Tried to get him busted even though he’d done nothing wrong. After that full lynch mob paranoia set in – everyone was a troll to the members. All of a sudden I was accused of being a troll because someone couldn’t find my name in the FAA database for airmen (even though there’s no requirement to be a pilot to be there). But I have two surnames, so it’s not easily found. That got the mods excited, as you’re supposed to have your full name and I only had my second surname initial. In the end they sided with me and I’m still a member, but the whole experience left a really bad taste in my mouth. I don’t post there anymore unless it’s just something for sale. It was scary to see how quick the lynch mob gathered and the pack mentality set in for various members – I now understand why Elias Canetti’s “Crowds and Power” won a Nobel prize..
I don’t know what the best solution is for forums. I like that it gets more civilized with real names and you put a name to the opinion. But, I also dislike the scenario I just described, which can only happen when you use full name.
As @AdamFrisch correctly pointed out, requiring full names is not always guaranteeing civil behaviour, as we can apparently observe on Facebook (where I don’t have an account so I only read about the awful things apparently going on there in the paper 
).
Or just accept this as a fact and take what you read in a forum with a grain of salt:
To me, as someone who has been using the Internet for 24 years now, the possibility to use pseudonyms plus the required critical thinking on the other end feels much better than the current political attempts to finally establish strong mechanisms to limit freedom of expression on the Internet and to essentially ban free speech. This is the best English speaking source which I found to explain this current German initiative. In short, platform providers would be obliged to delete any “unlawful” content (which is a very wide definition – think a discussion about flight in known icing for an extreme example!) or risk a fine of 5 million Euros. You don’t have to be a genius to see that they would rather delete too much than too little content faced with such drastic threats.
And I’m certain that soon after, Germany will try to “fix the Internet” for the whole EU again. Awful prospects if you ask me.
