Recently I’ve been unblocked and invited by Patrick, the most active Nextion Community Admin. I’ll sum up the relevant part of the conversation, followed by the key quotes from Patrick so that you can hear the original and finally you’ll find my opinion on all this at the bottom.
- Gerry, another Nextion Admin, passed away. He was the guy from the Nextion kickstarter video and apparently the main reason why UNUF people were systematically blocked in their forum.
- As a consequence, Patrick offers to no more block people just for being UNUF members and even unblock those that already have been blocked - like me. While I certainly don’t appreciate the reason for this change (no one deserves death IMO), I think it’s a step in the right direction nonetheless.
- However, that’s pretty much the only change. Their forum will still require login to read, will still have the same rules about reverse engineering, etc.
- Oh, and don’t mention TJC. While I talked a lot with Patrick about it, apparently other Nextion (Itead?) folks just want to see everything related deleted and banned.
Patrick’s original messages
First, I would like to say (without diminishing Gerry’s memories and past contributions), not everything that UN blames me for was my direct doing.
The rule that Nextion/Itead has is NO posting of source code that exposes Nextion sources, an executable as a tool is fine without sources. This got Hag in trouble when he did not want to consider, from there UN got banned, and the blantent falsehoods propagated by the UN group over the fonts and other issues lead to association with reverse engineering groups to be banned.
Now that Gerry passed away, I am willing to work towards patching things up, so I invited you to discuss what is felt as wrongs.
[…]
Nextion will not support UN, Luma and a few others did too much damage for any forgiveness to be expected in their hearts. Nextion will likely (perhaps) extend an amnesty to prior banned users that found themselves only looking for information and ended up at UN.
[…]
if there is anyone is opposed to being unblocked and keeping the peace
– no one is being forced to return
– the Rules are still the Rules
[…]
When the traditionals see an offense, it is dealt with. Posting of external links, bitching about pre-releases, or to bad mouth the company, its product, etc – from the traditional element this will have bad results. Hence why I have mentioned many times for users to keep it to the technical, it is a developers forum to discuss development.
[…]
TJC is not supported, for the traditionals this is high offense, I can buy a few hours of leniency before a hammer drops but usually not much more than this. […] Pursuing an argument on the issue … instaban.
My thoughts
I spent a lot of time explaining why many people here are pissed by Patricks replies, why they seem arrogant, and why Nextion has the image it has - including how to prevent/improve all this. I specifically explained that his “counter” examples often completely miss the point, making the discussion futile. I also made clear that explanations as “A Cortex M0 certainly has no nVidia/GPU subsystems onboard.” (sic) are pretty much equivalent to calling someone straight out an idiot - especially if it’s in a reply to a well-made bug report (with a bug actually confirmed and fixed).
He emphasized more than once that my points were heard and considered. And indeed, when I posted over there about my v1.62.1 issue, he honestly investigated it and gave helpful replies. No “maybe you’re too stupid to read the instruction set” or anything like that, only honest investigation of the issue.
All good? No, unfortunately not. While he showed that he’s indeed capable of providing nicer replies and to give me the benefit of the doubt he so often asks for, he also did the opposite more than once during our conversation. Many more bs examples were given, and I’ve been accused of missing the most obvious things in my arguments even though I explicitly mentioned them.
To sum up, I appreciate the fact that UNUF people aren’t directly banned anymore. I want to believe that the ambience in general will improve since he now knows how to not infuriate people with his otherwise helpful replies but I still have serious doubts. We shall see…
Considering that my talk with him is going on for weeks now, there’s a looot more I’d like to share here. Certainly won’t talk about everything since it was a private conversation but I think one or two goodies can be shared.
Let me know what you think!
Max
