On moral/ethics concerning Community members

[Rodolfo]

On Nov. 29, @davidlevy introduced himself to the community with the following message:

Hi,
I'm new to Chevereto but after researching all options I felt Chevereto was the best solution for my community image sharing website.
I'm a Star Citizen fan, and friends with a lot of other big fans.. some of us take great screenshots and I do cosplay and manage a cosplay discord channel.
SO... we thought.. why not do our own website. Cuz flicker now sucks. And imgur has too low of an uploading size limit.
We're working on the site now and things are going great.
Will share when we're ready to make it public.

In that same topic you can find a discussion where @davidlevy accused @tomsit of stealing his idea. By that time, @tomsit was listed as "Staff member" which at this time now reads "Community Staff". For the record, the quoted text above is all the contents of the idea of the alleged website plagiarism.

Regardless if you either support @davidlevy or @tomsit, what I want to encourage here is distraction free opinions.

- Was @tomsit unethical? Why?
- Should members (users, staff and community staff) of this community fit a ethical code that avoids this kind of situations?
- What kind of measures should be taken?

Hope to get mature opinions, the idea is to came up with code of conduct (if needed) for everybody.

P.S. Keep in mind that Community Staff members here don't get paid, aren't considered employees and they help only on good will. They aren't part of development and they don't have access to client data.

 

[SirMoo]

This has been fun to watch.

1) Was it unethical. Sure. Maybe. A tad, more shady. But there is no loss to @davidlevy. He could have made his own and used his connections in the community to make @tomsit's less relevant. This is how business tends to work...

2) God no. We start enforcing what people can do with this community software and it's only going to cause even more problems. So if I make a site dedicated to pictures of the moon, should I have the ability to tell others "Nah, you can't put a picture of the moon because I have a pictures of the moon." It's not the place of anyone here to tell me what I can and can't do with my license.

3) None? He got shamed in that game(?) community for his actions. That's really all that needs to be happen. It's a business. His base not very receptive.

Bonus) If one is to expect some sort of side effect on @tomsit then the same should be on @davidlevy for causing a drama and bringing it to the community and trying to get people to cause problems for us here. While I get there was confusion at first over if @tomsit has some position of power (able to prevent someone from renewing their license, etc) that has been fixed.

It may be important going forward to note somewhere that community staff are simply here to maintain order over the forums and do not represent the company in an official way.

 

[lovedigit]

It may be important going forward to note somewhere that community staff are simply here to maintain order over the forums and do not represent the company in an official way.

i won't comment who was wrong or right.
because this needs to be imposed in bold letters on the forum that forum modetators are not directly associated with the company. And only here to adhere and maintain the community.

If you ask me, if it was clear that forum moderators are not actual paid staff of the chevereto, this would never happen.
Sure there would still be a post on reddit, but it would only say a "chevereto user" or "chevereto forum moderator" instead of "chevereto staff".

 

[Rodolfo]

If you ask me, if it was clear that forum moderators are not actual paid staff of the chevereto, this would never happen.
Sure there would still be a post on reddit, but it would only say a "chevereto user" or "chevereto forum moderator" instead of "chevereto staff".

People understood that the developer was working with him. That was never the case, but that's the way in which most people got this. When the "staff" thing was fixed the damage was already made. I've think that I've fixed that, if something else should be added please let me know.

The company staff (not Community Staff) already have a basic code. You know it already, I've accessed tons of websites for testing/support and you have never heard about a data leak, emails or ideas being stolen or anything like that. Chevereto is on the market since 2011, take your own conclusions.

If one is to expect some sort of side effect on @tomsit then the same should be on @davidlevy for causing a drama and bringing it to the community and trying to get people to cause problems for us here. While I get there was confusion at first over if @tomsit has some position of power (able to prevent someone from renewing their license, etc) that has been fixed.

People on reddit and SC really trashed @tomsit for this, that's enough imo. True, a code o conduct must go on both ways as money doesn't buy moral rights.

I really hope that this is just one-time thing, I will hate to have to came up with a code of conduct because just like @SirMoo said, that needs someone doing police and this thing is software.

 

[lovedigit]

People understood that the developer was working with him. That was never the case, but that's the way in which most people got this. When the "staff" thing was fixed the damage was already made. I've think that I've fixed that, if something else should be added please let me know.

The company staff (not Community Staff) already have a basic code. You know it already, I've accessed tons of websites for testing/support and you have never heard about a data leak, emails or ideas being stolen or anything like that. Chevereto is on the market since 2011, take your own conclusions.

Yeah, I totally agree. I have been with chevereto for a long time, and will continue to recommend it to others as I know that it has been robust so far as a software.

 

[Jailer]

@Rodolfo you don't own this. Just as you and others have pointed out the community will take care of it. @davidlevy learned a tough lesson in business development but in my opinion was not "damaged" in any way. He put his idea out there on a public forum for all to see. He still has his idea and is free to pursue it unimpeded. Was it a little shady of @tomsit to run the idea and build the site? Maybe but it's a free world and if you see an opportunity to fill a need then run it and may the best site win.

The only way this could be considered immoral and some action needing to take place is if @tomsit were using his position as community staff to moderate @davidlevy posts to his advantage and that doesn't seem to be the case, forum moderation logs would show it if it were.

@davidlevy needs to be careful about who he is disparaging on line as his incorrect assumption that @tomsit were a staff member of chevereto and using that as a basis to damage @Rodolfo product reputation is actionable.

In the end it's a bunch of unnecessary drama that has played out and you've already taken steps to clarify your moderators position in an attempt to avoid the confusion in the future. I don't feel anything further is needed on your part to address this.

 

[davidlevy]

It's an interesting topic, we all can and usually do have to face responsibility for our actions. If our actions bring about an angry mob.. even if it's unfair.. we likely contributed to it.
Case in point, on dA I once made a post offering a small amount for some cool looking artwork, the budget was small and I gave some example not knowing how many hours those examples take to make. A lead artist in the community with alot of followers saw my post, and without any other provocation decided to make me an example of everything that they hate about their industry with being underpaid. The thread went on fire and meme's were made, etc etc. I even got 1 direct death threat from that single OP. Really sucky experience but I learned from it.. do your best to do due diligence first on what something normally costs or ask first before giving a budget limit.

Okay, so how does that story fit?

Tom did something, that a large portion of the related community (to his website) didn't care for how he particularly went about it because of how it looked. People did their own research into him and came to that conclusion that it was unethical along with those that took my reply for face value. Tom agreed the optics were bad.

Rodolfo provides support via public threads, I found this out via PM that support will not be offered privately. Okay.. well... different than what I'm used to but okay, so I made the introduction threat to try to make a good first impression on why I was here. And then made a support thread for help but because of a language barrier didn't go well at first. I leave the forum to try to figure out some of the problems on my own since help here did not go well. Like trying to figure out integrating Chevereto user tables with a lightweight CMS.

A couple weeks later of struggling with finding a solution for a fast lightweight CMS that can be integrated, I start getting PMs if I have an alternate name of Tomsit on Reddit... I said no but that name sounds really familiar... I saw the website on reddit.. was surprised because it's EXACTLY the platform I'm working with.. what the hell are the odds of that? huh... well this sucks but oh well.... the guy might just be farming for Karma because no one knows (in those circles) who he is. Then shortly later it clicked, Tomsit was that staff member on the Chevereto website who hit it off with me about Star Citizen! When I pointed this out privately, the number of people having conversations about this with me couldn't believe someone would do something so low and encourage me to speak out. So I did, and the rest is history. Why did they think it was low? Ask them. Why do I think it was low? Because this is a place I came for help and wasn't expecting someone with a staff badge to do that. To me, to many others, that is the developer's staff swooping in on what a client came to them for. The optics are unethical. And the more digging people did, the worse it looked.

By Tom not being well known in the community for whom he was making a website for, and not doing the research and simply throwing it up in one night, he put himself out there and for any risks that came with it like, oh.. didn't someone just posted on the website for which you're a staff member for, about buying Chevereto for the same exact thing? How does that not enter your mind if you really care about the community members like this client that came to you? And the fact that Tom builds websites like these to sell them later but then claims they are not for profit (people pointed that out). And that he sold his account before and then bought it back. And that he doesn't actually have a lot of shared related content he's created then published or released over the years... OF COURSE, there'd be a big risk that people will backlash against that. He took the risk, even if ignorantly or innocently if he had asked the community (his customers since apparently this is a business) first... this probably wouldn't have happened. And btw, his backlash/community reaction was very mild compared to mine on dA about simply not having the right budget.

At the end of the day, the optics were unethical. And that's all that matters/was the issue.

This is all I'm going to type. If I start pointing out the abundant but common argument fallacies people are using here in this thread it's not going to help anything.

 

[Rodolfo]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, however, I must address some topics.

1. No one tempered your efforts, no one stealed your work, custom implementations, design, anything. You got the idea of open a niche website and you thought that you owned that market just because you said so. You paid for software access, not exclusive rights over a niche.

2. The ethics of the company forbids staff members getting in the middle of clients projects. That applies to company staff only.

3. This community has members from all around the world. We won't fix a code imposed by borders, we will (if needed) get a code based on our own tastes since the ethics of a community without a code must be agreed by its members, not imposed. That's what we are trying to do in this thread.

 

[Tierri Lopes]

Excuse me if im wrong but...
I see no point of discussion here, in the moment you wrote why you were gonna use it for, you should expect someone could copy it.
I mean, its written on an internet page publicy available and indexed by google.
I understand you didnt though on it when writting, but next time keep things to yourself until they're finished.

Im not defending anyone, just pointing facts that will always happen sooner or later.