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Thousands of posts (& charts) lost forever?
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Many here or on HPC may have heard about an incident wherein I asked that HPC chose whether it would "ban" myself, or another poster, with a habit of posting wind-ups and other "nasty" comments on my threads.
If you go to HPC, you will find his explanations of what happened but not mine. This thread is to set the record straight, and was inspired when someone registered on GEI, and began making wind-ups here on another site.
(as posted on a thread in the Members' Section of GEI):
QUOTE (Little Professor @ Oct 6 2010, 05:37 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Peace and love, Bubbs, don't let the rotters get you down 
I don't know if this is the same "Little Professor" from HPC or not. But maybe that doesn't matter.
There's a thread with my name on it on HPC, which I am not allowed to post upon. The following comment was posted there by Little Professor:
First a comment from another poster, XX, (who someone said was me, I can assure you it was not):
I do not really care either way. But banning someone is not a nice thing to do unless there is clearly a breach of forum rules.
QUOTE = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Ltttle Professor says:
I would agree entirely.
Dr Bubb made an ultimatum to the mods to ban me or ban him. I had not breached the forum rules, my only 'crime' was to dare to disagree with Bubb and point out that his prediction of "crash cruise speed" resuming by the end of 2009 had turned out to be bunkum.
To accede to Bubb's demands, the mods would have to either ban me for no good reason, or ban him at his own request. They chose to do the latter.
He subsequently spat out his dummy and made legal threats demanding all 'his' content be deleted from HPC. Technically they could have just ignored his threats, as the terms and conditions of this forum clearly state that all content posted here becomes the property of housepricecrash.co.uk, but presumably it just wasn't worth the hassle trying to deal with his legal wrangling.
For the record, I never asked nor wanted Dr Bubb to be banned, nor for his posts to be deleted. That was all entirely his own doing. He did actually post some interesting stuff, even though most of his posts were simply rather tragic attempts to make himself look like an uber-leet techinical analyst, with lots of random graphs copied and pasted from Yahoo Finance accompanied by some meaningless cryptic comments which could go either way. His trading diary is a classic example - he never actually says what trades he is making, or even any actual explanation of the technical data he is posting. The one time he did make an actual concrete prediction, in the housebuilders thread, he got it wrong and couldn't handle this being pointed out.
Accusations of censorship are ridiculous, anyone who wants to read his work knows where to find him - he certainly promoted his forum enough times on here, and it is the number one link on google for 'dr bubb'. Meanwhile over in his own house, dissent will not be tolerated, as per this rather ludicrous example in the moderation rules.
(he then quotes rules that were proposed by another Moderator, as if they were mine.)
UNQUOTE = = = = = = = = = = = = =
I shall now respond HERE, as I am not allowed to defend myself on HPC:
1/
LP's 1-2 posts on that page did not seem outrageously offensive on their own. But there were dozens of such posts by him and others on the same thread. The last two were merely the last straw of a widespread pattern of nasty postings from about 6-8 posters on HPC, who have been dubbed the "antibodies" by a poster here (Member100). They seemed to think they were serving HPC by ganging up on me on a regular basis, whenever they think they have spotted a tiny error in one of my forecasts, no matter how trivial the apparent "error" may be. (Anyone who has experienced this sort of drip-drip of nasty postings will know how it feels. If you have not, then maybe you should try sticking your neck out, and make a series of serious and well-thought out forecasts on HPC, and see how long it takes to acquire your own "antibodies" posting against you. There is no pleasure in it, I can tell you.)
2/
I was fed up by the inaccuracy and inherent nastiness of such postings and, frankly, have been ready to quit HPC for some time. What kept me posting was that many folks there would regularly thank me for my forecasts, and/or send me PM's telling me to ignore the abuse - But one gets fed up eventually.
One of the reasons I was thinking to leave HPC has been mentioned in other posts. That is, the Mods have now taken to deleting links back to GEI. This is unfair, and can be considered a form of theft. When I post material which is an excerpt from another site, I normally post a link back to the origin of the material. For some months now, all of my longer and more thoughtful posts on HPC were first posted on GEI. And they may be part of a larger thread on GEI with more material on my own website. To publish and excerpt on HPC without a link back, is unfair to the original source of material.
What I was finding was I would post a long excerpt from GEI, with a link back, and then find a few hours ago that the link was missing. In effect, the material that was contributed with a link was being taken over as HPC material, with its source deleted. I wrote a long post complaining about this practice, and never got around to sending it. That post has been shown elsewhere on GEI, and I may show it here too, depending on how this discussion goes. In addition, I have previously asked HPC Mods to explain why they were deleting my links, and never got a satisfactory explanation.
To say that I am "recruiting for GEI", would mean that I am recruiting for HPC when I publish an excerpt from an HPC post here, with a link back to the source thread on HPC. And I have done that hundreds, if not thousands of times. By LP's reasoning, I was therefore recruiting for HPC on my website. That's not how I see. I was merely following standrad "fair practice" on the web.
3/
By asking HPC to ban me, or ban LP, I was asking HPC Moderators to choose whether or not they wanted me to go on offering my content there. I would often spend hours collecting data, which would then be used for charts or for analysis on on thread here (and for its similar excerpt on HPC.) If my serious content was not to be taken seriously, why should I go on posting it there? I was ready to stop, by the time I read LP's last two posts.
When I posted the ultimatum, my intention was: If they wanted my content, they would have to offer some sort of protection from the "antibody" posters. (To show how seriously I take this matter, we have introduced a new moderation policy giving just that protection on GEI.) If the Mods allowed LP (and others) to go on disrupting my threads, and distorting my content, I was ready to depart the website. My post intentionally carried this issue to a decision point, and the HPC Mods made their choice.
4/
An alternative action might have been to: move the thread containing the ultimatum, to suspend both LP and myself for maybe 12-24 hours , and ask me to explain why I was so upset. I would have done so (as I have above), and then HPC mods could have had more time to make a rational choice rather than reacting so quickly and emotionally. They should have known this was coming from the previous 2-3 incidents, when I had voluntarily requested a one week's suspension, while complaining about the "antibodies" posters attacking my threads. But HPC mods have never been known for their wisdom.
5/
I never made any request to HPC Moderators that all my threads their be deleted there. What I did do, was mention HERE ON GEI ONLY (!), that I was considering making such a request - and I "may" give such a request to HPC sometime in the future. Speculating about the possibility of making a request on a totally different website, is miles away from making the request on HPC, or to their Moderators, or owner. Obviously, that statement was picked up FROM HERE by HPC Mods. I think it was a very reckless and damaging decision, since HPC readers will now be unable to see those old post. They were a treasure trove of cyclical analysis, with many right and wrong forecasts as anyone would expect. An entire pattern of analysis was laid out, with historical results that all could see. Now much of that is lost to history and those with an interest in property cycles, and that is a pity.
6/
Where do I go from here? I am convinced that there is a readership, and maybe a big one, for serious thinking about property cycles, and how bellwethers (like builder share prices and so forth) might be used to forecast property prices. HPC has struck a mighty blow against those who think that serious analysis has a place on their website. They have kept their site totally open to those who want to disrupt serious posters. Wind-ups, sarcasm, abuse, and misrepresentation will go on reigning supreme. It is ridiculous, and a great insult to those HPC readers who want to see some serious analysis take place there.
The time has come to offer those interested in Property prices and the workings of the market a serious place to post. GEI has been doing that for four years, and we have developed a great stable of posters and readers of serious analysis of markets in general. Many of these people were chased off HPC and other sites like them, by the antics of "antibodies." I invite those with an interest in something better to type: GlobalPropertyCycles.com into their browsers and have a look.
If you like what you see, please join us in a new adventure.
: see 
