'Collective punishment' vs. good citizens of polarhome

[pwlin05_debian]

Hi friends@polarhome

It's very sad to hear that the action of script kiddies, bot-runners and worm writers has put the community in a place when you are planning to ditch the free ftp account, but as a law-obedient citizen of this community, I like to ask you to make an exception for people who did nothing wrong and worked hard learning new computer languages and those who used their ftp and web space for producing something useful for the community.

As in example of myself, I came here in [05 Jun 2005] and said hi and thanked all the people for providing this wonderful service. I also mentioned that I am going to use this service for learning and developing. In the meantime I created a firefox toolbar in xul language that you can check in my account. You can install it as an extension. Besides checking the ftp and http logs of my account will show you that I never did anything wrong to be punished in such a great extends. Even in the other side, I tried to develop something and offer my source code and work to the community and I am continuing to doing so.

Mr. Zoltan writes in his [declaration]:

Where are the white angels, the brave ones? I made my servers for them... I want to co-operate with those guys and I do not give any support for decadence, malicious activity and personal disaster. There is no excuse for under-education and ignorance.

I can't be more agreed with him, but you must understand that an honest web developer hates those malicious user as same as you do.

The result of this collective punishment is that my web space will be leveled to the ground, the work i did for the community will be lost, and I have to leave everything behind and go find another place, much like every other time.

The worst part is that I always will be labeled and grouped with those parasites and malicious users no matter where I go, after a while the script kiddies take over the free space which is in the reality is offered for the people to make something good out of it -people like me-.

I understand you will kill all the parasites but besides that, you are also killing those handful good citizens who are really not in state of paying, yet they did nothing wrong and even helped the open source community in 1 way or another.

So I really like to ask you to look in the accounts and logs of those people who did nothing wrong and if you consider their work worth of staying, please let them continue their learning work.

Either way and still, Thank you for all the good works and even if I can't stay anymore, I wish you good luck, you are doing a very good job to protect this community and I would categorize my departure as inevitable, looking at the sheer of abuse you got.

[miker_alpha]

You are right, it is sad, and probably unfair to the real users -- development types, O.S. hounds, (And O.S. fanatics like myself) The problem is a historical one -- whenever something is free for the common good: Google for Tragedy of the commons...

The workaround is simple; Invest in the one-time cost of upgrading to a shell account. Perhaps it is more than you need, but it works, and in one swoop you become a respected member of the Polarhome community (How much is 10 units of your local currency??)

HTH,
MikeR

[pwlin05_debian]

miker_alpha, I have to pay 10 euro and to be honest, it's a lot of money considering i live with my parents on pocket money.

But of course you are right, the common good is dying. There is no escape from that. Still, I can also see that keeping the spirit of free community going here is very simple: let those handful 'real' users continue with their accounts. There is no use in seeing them get punished.

[Matej]

This is not a punishment. The bad users get punished by loosing their accounts and getting banned. It's a protection that will try to minimize abuse and allow polarhome to continue functioning.

No one was labeled in any way. I agree that it’s unfair to some users but I don’t think it would be a good idea to make exceptions. It’s not a problem for 1 user but this will lead to more and more requests and it would be very hard to verify (or judge correctly) if the requests are justified.

And if you really decide that you can’t stay with polarhome you should know that you don’t have to leave anything behind you. You can move your entire files and database data without much trouble.

That’s just my opinion but you can always try your luck by asking Zoltan. He’s still in charge round here.

[sjaz]

I think based on that long post itself, an exception should be made.

Fair play to you, good user.

[zoli]

Hi,

I must admit, that I fully understand pwlin05’s point. I really feel sorry for everything what have happened and what polarhome became.
As an open source developer - I am willing to offer for all ftp users that run some open source/free project on polarhome hosts to keep their ftp accounts in the future as well.

They need to send a mail to support@polarhome.com with the following information:

1. Real name
2. Address
3. city/country
4. polarhome username
5. polarhome host
6. project name
7. project description

These requests will be evaluated and access allowed or denied.

This offer is valid just during next two months (until end of October 2005) in order to support open source developers and make easier and painless this transformation that we are already started.

To be honest, I would like to get such mails form shell users as well - just to have some picture what is developing at polarhome.

[miker_alpha]

Zoli, that's a grand idea. But won't it make a lot of extra work for you?

How may FTP users are there, currently? must be in the thousands. Some (many) of them possibly haven't touched their files in years, and these accounts should be left to wither. Of the others, how many are doing something useful? Any estimates?

Perhaps a quote from the previous post (Zoli's) could be put in an email to be sent to all FTP accounts?

MikeR

[sjaz]

We could all chip in here and help... They could email ftpusers@polarhome.com or something which is sent to us all, and we create a list after say ... a few weeks which we send to Zoltan and he can update the accounts.

[Matej]

I don't think that there are *that* many developers with polarhome but some request will certainely be made.

It makes mee feel realy happy when I look for some aplication or info and I find it hosted by polarhome.

[pwlin05_debian]

Thanx Zoli! I am sending my application to support@polarhome.com

I really appreciate your generous offer.


Thank you very much guys.