Artist: King Crimson
Song: 21st century schizoid man
Album: In the Court of the Crimson King
Ahh, sock it to me,
Sock it to me,
Rock it to me.
Come on, come on!
Come on!
And uhh,
Groove me, mama, I want you to
Groove me!

Na, I like yours better

Anyone else? I strongly suggest you do this anonymously unless you want to be labeled by the bullies here as a “LT attack dog” or some other evil character assassinating moniker.

You’re quite welcome! It’s not that I hate OCS or want to destroy it, I just want to make it better.

Yes, you’re right. CS is extremely ambiguous in its rules and when/how/why they apply them. As you know quite well, admin rights are regularly abused (eg. the wiki, moving threads, threatening to delete a profile) to silence dissenters in various ways but at the same time glaring abuses of privacy are overlooked (eg. reading messages, illegally keeping messages indefinitely, etc). CS doesn’t have proper rules or changes them at a whim them when they turn out to be silly and ineffective. Sometimes they change the rules without even telling their users!

OCS is remarkably simple in comparison: we explicitly allow anonymity and “complaining” and always have. Everything is public. Simple rules that have not been changed since the start.

All I am saying is that it wouldn’t hurt to understand the amount of freedom you’re getting here. But then, I’m sure you’ll find at least one sentence in this post you can take out, hopelessly argue against, while ignoring the entire point of the original post. Go ahead, you are a great source of entertainment and are in fact helping us make our arguments clearer and more to-the-point. Thank you.

Also, understand that because you remain anonymous, this invites people to be less nice or even civil to you. If you had a name, I’m sure you’d get more respect.

not so fast “but i’m merely asking how tg rationalizes his comment about not being able to be anonymous on CS. ”
Cs does not allow fake profiles.so how do you expalain the admins allowing a fake profile. And anonymous comments are not allowed on the cs forum .are they?

I speak for my self and no one else.

How do you explain this “non-anonymous” user? http://www.couchsurfing.com/people/freud

I just checked to see which mandy you were talking about .Nope it is not Mandie M(australia/romania) who seems to be a nice person.

The Mandy I am referring to goings under the screen name “Mandy Live…. United States Arizona”

1. We use the Akismet spamfilter which catches most of our anonymous spam automatically. I look at it once in a while to check for false positives, but it’s simply too much to keep track of.
2. If you have an account and one of your comments has been approved, the following will be approved as well. If you haven’t had one approved or you post anonymously, it is always held for moderation. It is looked at whenever Callum or me have time.

I suggest making an account (yes, a fake one probably) to make it easier to complain to us, although I will say in advance that “flooding” the site (multiple replies right after each other or posting the same content more than once) will be frowned upon. Your anonymity is a privilege and a right you don’t get in CS, so please respect it.

I think because your “name” was approved once, it will automatically approve all your comments from now. Or maybe it’s your IP that’s been approved. I dunno – but it’s happened to me too, so please chill. Just try using a different IP address and a new name (like “continually doubtful”) and see what happens….

I want OCS to go on the record and say that all of my anonymous comments are personally approved each and every time (at lightening speed no less!) and that the two times I had a problem were not because I was singled out but because all anonymous comments have to be approved.

Btw good job on approving my last one in under a second. Wow! I should change my ID to “continually impressed!”

Until this is properly refuted I’ll have no choice but to assume that OCS intentionally did just what’s evidently clear already.

I’m nobody, just an average user, and feel the issues are more important than who I am. I came to this site because I heard it was a place where ideas could be discussed, not where people were it was thought of as progress when PEOPLE where verbally beaten up on.

OCS has a strong history of vilifying the person, not the issues, and I’d rather not have that happen with me.

get over it, life is unfair, you wont get anywhere without exposing your identity. you ought to understand that people have no real interest in putting effort into a debate without the courtesy of disclosing each others identity, even if you were a feckled ugly midget with a fake-leather jacket.

No offense, but I think there is a better way for you to communicate your message. Everyone is going to disagree about something sometime. I respect people who are able to communicate their message in a clear, calm and intelligent way (regardless of whether I agree or not). It’s not so much about what we say, but how we say it.

I think if you are able to improve the “how” you wouldn’t feel the need to hide your identity.

And if I believed something but was afraid of what my friends thought about me, they wouldn’t really be my friends…

Look at one of your first comments to this thread last month. You looked up that guy’s IP so I assumed that you try and hunt down everyone that has a differing viewpoint as yourself. Sorry to assume. Maybe you are actually learning to not waste your time? Congrats!

Or maybe you’re learning that it’s bad tactical form to give any accreditation to someone with a differing viewpoint as yourself. I have a WordPress and I know how easy it is to look it up. Keep up your fear mongering, Callum!

I want OCS to go on the record and say that all of my anonymous comments are personally approved each and every time (at lightening speed no less!) and that the two times I had a problem were not because I was singled out but because all anonymous comments have to be approved.

Btw good job on approving my last one in under a second. Wow! I should change my ID to “continually impressed!”

That’s an interesting tactic. I wonder if the LT thought the same thing about you guys and that’s why they stopped responding to you every ridiculous accusation and demand? Think about it.

@Roy: “Get.A.Life”

Thanks for your intercultural understanding Roy. But by get a life do you mean that if I’m not happy with the way that OCS is going I should stop being a a nuisance here and move on to another organization that’s more suited to what I stand for? That I should stop wasting the time of those involved here that are happy with the way OCS is going and since I’m in a very, very small minority of people that are outraged I should go find a group that is into what I’m into instead of continually trying to affect change here? Would that be what you mean?

I don’t hate OCS and I’m not trying to destroy it, I’m just trying to make it better.

Current settings are to notify admins whenever comments are being held for moderation, and comment author to have to fill in their email and name (their validity not being checked in any way). There’s no blacklisting of words or IPs. During the whopping 15-20 minutes before changing IPs and starting this side show it was friday evening for all but one of the blog admins so perhaps it’s understandable if blog comments were not instantly approved.

I doubt any of the admins would have changed these settings just to silence a contributor. If this happened, I for one am not aware of who did it and when. I’ve seen a few perfectly good comments from new as well as old (I think) commenters before so your case wouldn’t be unique in the history of OCS. Anyway, whatever happened you’d be happy to know you or anyone isn’t unjustly blocked from commenting right now.

Following Roy’s advice now, I suggest the same for everyone else as well

Get.A.Life.

1) @continually dissapointed: Let me categorically state that I did not block your IP. If I had chosen to block an IP it would have been at the firewall level, so any blocked IP would not have any access to the server.

2) @continually disgusted: You said “As I stated in the followup to that comment, that wasn’t me.” You post anonymously. Who are you? How are we supposed to tell you and “your impostors” apart? All of the admins on this blog have access to the list of IPs from which comments are posted. Personally, I have not looked at your IPs, I consider that a waste of my time.

You said:

“I think we will do well to keep our responses factual and non-personal.” Are you serious?? REad this thread again if you’re still confused.

I think you misunderstood my words. I said I think that keeping our responses factual and non-personal is a good thing. I did not say we had achieved it, I was agreeing that we should strive to do so.

This will be my last response to anyone who claims to be “continually disgusted” or permutations thereof. I believe your posts here to be trolling and from now on, I will ignore them.

Cute! Anu, I love how you can’t resist to take little jabs at CS whenever possible. Do you have to ponder over them for a while or do they just come to you immediately? Clever!

Oh wow! You guys are really on top of things right now! My last comment was approved by you guys the very second I submitted it. The page reloaded after I hit submit and it was there. Wow!! You guys are really fast at the approval! I wonder if you’ll get this one online as fast, too??

Any other faerie stories for us?

1) your comments sat on the approval queue for a few hours while OCS were not hanging out online, nothing to get worried about (I’m sure you can understand, after all CS these days doesn’t seem to be too up-front with forwarding messages either

2) checking up on IPs, seems the comment posted on your name was posted from your close proximity so Callum might have made his conclusions based on that as well as reading the comment itself. Some additional information provided by the users were inconsistent though so I can pretty safely assume you did not really want to leave the FUD just yet.

Happy Halloween (we’re a bit behind here in Finlad )

A hint however: If you actually register on the site and you get one post approved, all of the following will appear directly. So, your anonymity is to blame as much as my lack of time to wade through all the spam. To give you an idea: we’ve blocked over 2000 spam messages so far through our system and have hardly ever had an accidental blocking, which is pretty damn good these days for an anonymous system!

@Callum: The fact that you blocked my IP address (while hypocritically waving the banner of anti-censorship) tells me that you KNOW my IP address. Then you should have known that the other ‘continually dissapointed’ that you supposed confused me with here “@continually disgusted: You said: “That was my last post on cs-fud.org.” Please live up to your word and stop wasting my bandwidth.” was not from the same IP address. Not only that, but it must have been you guys who posted that to discredit me and to silence me. Why else would you say “That was my last post on cs-fud.org” if you didn’t really want it to be my last post? Very sneaky guys.

Who’s watching the watchers, anyway? Is there anyone left paying attention to you guys that isn’t laughing at you?

As I stated in the followup to that comment, that wasn’t me. You should know that as you have a history of looking up the IPs of people who post comments and I doubt they are using the same one that I am. And because you CAN and DO look them up it’s pretty safe to say that it was one of you guys that posted the “that was my last post” line under my moniker. If not, you would have surely come clean in the name of all that is transparency with the knowledge that it was two different people, right? You guys are definitely sneaky and you almost got away with it. So close!

@Ben: “Many were attacking “cont disgust” with personal adjectives instead of refuting the comments with the facts of the case.” Thank you for acknowledging what’s really going on here. Attacking the messenger and using that assault to cover up the actual issues isn’t missed by everyone, OCS.

@Callum: “I think we will do well to keep our responses factual and non-personal.” Are you serious?? REad this thread again if you’re still confused. See this one: “continually disgusted sounds like a drunk who has just been arrested by the cops and is desperately trying all the trick in the book to get them pissed to beat him up even more . Lol. Poor continually disgusted! ” And then high and mighty Kasper even gets personal with “because of dogs like yourself”. If that’s doing well to keep things “factual and non-personal” you have one hell of barometer for success. I can only imagine what you’d be saying if you felt like you needed to actually improve in that area.

@Callum: “I’m not sure I agree about anonymous posting. You can’t participate in CouchSurfing anonymously.”

Really? So Sigmund Freud is alive and well and a CSer, right? See for yourself: http://www.couchsurfing.com/people/freud Since you can’t be anonymous or create a fake profile on CS, as you claim, it must really be him, right?

The same site that says I’m overreacting for not wanting to be harassed and scapegoated makes sure to throw other members under the bus with this: “Now isint that the tactic used by the LT (through their proxies) Mandy,Donna, and the rest of the attack dogs ?” Super, guys. And you wonder why I don’t want my name listed as people on your hate list? I could really do without being personally harassed, thanks.

Honestly, I don’t really expect you guys to actually stick to issues anymore. That hope is fading quickly. After reading through the FUD you throw at dissenters of you dissenters that’s obviously not what OCS is all about. Keep up your fear machine, guys! I’m sure someone is still listening without laughing. Right?

For one thing, the latter’s life will not be at risk for having an opinion. Let’s not confuse the two.

People who post anonymously on this site need the security of an “internet mask” to communicate their true feelings. They simply lack confidence. If I really believe in something, I want my name behind it.

@Kasper
Agreed. What I meant by “every OCS opinion” refers to any opinion by any member under the banner of “promoting open couchsurfing”. It’s a very wide definition…

Anyways, we could argue long and round about the general concept on Anonymity. I stand by my position that I am willing accept the trade off of accepting the fact that we’ll have more noise (and varying levels of quality) in the conversation than not having conversation at all. In this way, I see that anonymity as being an important tool for having conversation.

In the facts of this specific case, I don’t think many are arguing that cont disgust is right. Or even that people agree. I do think that his actions do remind us that the issues raised in OCS are far from over, and that OCS may need to do something about helping its perception.

Roy, “every OCS opinion” is hard to define. We’re a varied group of people and often (and fortunately) we don’t have the same opinion on matters.

It’s all about having the balls to stand up and say who you are and what your opinion is. What’s the point of saying “I disagree but I would rather not let anyone know”…

I don’t agree with every OCS opinion, but I respect that they have integrity to put their name behind their comments.

I agree with the sentiment of your post though, I think we will do well to keep our responses factual and non-personal.

1. Some people are overreacting to the “cont disgust” as an anonymous poster. @Callum, zak0r: There is nothing wrong with posting anonymously. This is just my opinion. Anonymity is very important. What if one were behind the great firewall of china and that person’s thoughts about democracy (corruption, or whatever) would get him shot? Again, this is just my opinion.
2. @others: Many were attacking “cont disgust” with personal adjectives instead of refuting the comments with the facts of the case. That tone can be turned around and used against you in the world of FUD mud slinging and the fight for “broader community perception”.
3. I think lots of “cont disgust”‘s comments were just troll bait. For example, I dispute the idea that the “why don`t YOU DO anything constructive in favour of couchsurfing?” rhetoric is just that, rhetoric trying to shift blame over to OCS. In looking back at the history of what’s happened, I see that the OCS movement started to try to push for proper and good legal standing (and maybe a more open moral vision) for CS. Their hands were kinda tied because they absolutely have no legal power in the CS entity. They can’t force an organization to adopt such legal ideas. And there was no desire at that time to fracture or destroy CS. So, the approach was to be constructive in discussion (in protest, dissent). However, I think the tone of the conversation just came off being abrasive. And it became a personality fight and dialog broke down. From that, I don’t see OCS as trying to destroy CS, or failing to be constructive.
3. @contdisgust: “we need a STRONG community now and it`s NOT the time to criticize.” This was an attitude of the US government (congress and administration) following 9/11. I’m not calling CS a crappy government, but I just want to illustrate my belief that a strong community includes the ability to have discourse and dissent without oppressing anyone’s comments. That includes “cont disgust”‘s own comments.
4. contdisgust says, “you really don’t have any clue about the CS legal status”. But I think it’s pretty clear in public documents (linked to in prior discussions) about the legal status. Internal corp policies is not “legal status”. I agree that many outside the organization knows what the internal policies are, but I think the public legal status has been found and is what the controversy is centering around.
5. @Daz, which Mandy are you talking about? I hope it’s not Mandie M, the new communications manager. I know her. And she’s a good person, not an attack dog.

Hey dearly disgusted, as someone here said, please do your homework. Kasper has worked a hell of a lot for CS, as have I and Matrixpoint (not to demean anyone else’s contributions!) – we became “unconstructive” after months and months of doing exactly that, when it finally became very clear the community was never playing a role for Casey & co in the sense we saw it (speaking for at least me & Matrixpoint here) was NOT a priority (obvious first just an edgy feeling since none of the internal discussions was public to no-one except the cronie bunch, then heard a few times in person this summer in phrases like “CS is just a service so why should the community have a voice”, “Users are stupid”, “CS is just about the couches, and should never have any ideology beyond that”). I really wanted to believe it would get better, but the final blow really was at the Rotterdam collective where 4-5 leaders present at any given time could no longer hide behind their online facades and I got to see first hand actions and attitudes I found less than amusing.

About criticism: don’t you think we haven’t tried before this site? If you knew anything of Casey you’d know it’s pretty much impossible to penetrate the all-American attitude of not saying anything directly, let alone react to anything except the most sugar-coned expressions of disagreement.

I’m still all for the COMMUNITY, just can’t fathom how the leadership can be as detached from the supposed values as it seems to be these days (most recently, I’m disgusted by outsourcing of a *volunteer* job… and some other things: paying people and then lying about it when directly asked. Not being upfront about the legal status of the organization when directly asked. Not dealing with appropriate attention and resources of a tricky safety situation even when it had been warned about as a possible scenario MONTHS before. Secretive and sneaky approaches whenever possible, lack of respect, playing out anyone not “trusted” (trust being a very strange thing indeed on CS, but going to the bottom of that would just be too gossipy)

Some more homework: Pickwick did not start this site, and has not been posting here himself (though his permission has been asked to redistribute some of his CS posts here). So labeling him as one of “us” or grouping everyone saying CS is not perfect is not really justified here. And since he isn’t “here” you can’t blame it on “us” to not do anything, it’s his decision to make (personal wish is him acting soon enough).

Of course there might have been plausible explanations and excuses for all of the above, but really, what’s the limit after which you shouldn’t become at least a bit jaded?

“Scared because some one finally got casey and his attack dogs in a situation where they just cannot react because they cant lie to get out of this situation”

Really? The “situation” seems to be a lot of talk and no action. THAT’s what I’m pointing out. Yep, I’m sure they’re scared of you guys bitching amongst yourselves in a few corners. Yep, I’d be shaking if I were them.

“People are getting desperate that their lies are gonna get exposed.”

You still don’t get it, do you? The thing is that NOTHING is getting exposed right now. If there was something to expose than DO IT! Go for it! What are you waiting for? Why are you holding back important info and not doing anything besides helplessly bitching? Don’t you owe it to your cause and to CSers everywhere (not to mention the five people that still really give a shit about what you have to say and aren’t just here to laugh at you) to do something about the injustices that “casey and his attack dogs” are dishing out? You threaten legal action but don’t follow through. Is OCS just lazy? Or is it that OCS sees this holding just enough water to champion the cause but too scared to follow through because you just might be wrong. Is it safer to bitch and moan and not really do anything about it than to do something and be wrong? If you’re so sure, what’s fucking stopping you? THAT’s my question.

“Pickwick offered to work together with Casey&LT…it was refused” Really? Did he write to them directly or post something in one of the 10,000 CS groups? If he wrote to them directly (or through the Policy FAQ page, like they suggest), where’s a copy of the letter? I’m sure I’m not the only one who would love to see it. But you’re still missing the point about actual action and following through, aren’t you? “Unfortunately, but expectedly, it was refused, or ignored, which is basically the same.” It works both ways, doesn’t it Kasper?

But my favorite line: “But sorry you are not going to get a reaction here.”

Is your six paragraph dissertation what you call “not going to get a reaction”?

Don’t worry – this will really probably be my last post here (although it doesn’t seem likely, judging from the comment above me, that other people won’t be ‘continually disgusted’ by you guys). While feeding you trolls is certainly amusing I’m sure there’s got to be better things to do with my time. Thanks for the laughs! Have fun preaching to your choir (the congregation fell asleep months ago)!

continually disgusted sounds like a drunk who has just been arrested by the cops and is desperately trying all the trick in the book to get them pissed to beat him up even more .
Lol. Poor continually disgusted! I feel so sorry for the pathetic situation you find yourself in right now. Noone to hear you .You are scared and pissed at the same time .Scared because some one finally got casey and his attack dogs in a situation where they just cannot react because they cant lie to get out of this situation or have Jim stone give his standard answer “we are researching the problem”.They are so scared to even reply to anyone on couchsurfing.
Did they reply to you ? Hmmm I guess NOT thats why you came sulking over here to get a reaction. This is the situation where the more casey and the LT keep silent the more the guilt increases .And your impatience shows the guilt.But sorry you are not going to get a reaction here.

I see you cant get casey and his attack dogs to give you any answers . That is too bad continually disgusted!! I am continually disgusted that you did not get an answer from casey. This is soooo disgusting!!

I am so happy that the attack dogs made the dumb move and labeled Pickwick a pirate .That was the worst thing they could ever make. And they will keep making that because they are so paranoid.Just like you trying to get a reaction instead of getting answers (unless you already know casey is guilty and are just trying to get a reaction to hide that guilt) .

I think it’s hilarious (and SO typical!) that you guys are attacking me here, and not really defending your issue or really doing anything constructive about it besides jumping all over edits on the Wiki and endless discussion about the OCS logo. It’s sad to see so much energy put into so much hatred. Doesn’t BW need some help, or did they boot you out already too? But whatever, have fun!