lol so a bunch of interested third parties came in and pretended to be good faith users to help squash the questioning of their product.
But hey, at-least there was a little blue message 4 days later, and no repercussions for those involved. 
@maltfield should be banned from the forum and discussion of nova related products should need approval before posting.
I am wondering if this should be a project showcase rather than in the general category given OP’s conflict of interest. Feels like an ad to me, especially since the linked “article” is from the manufacturer’s website.
Have to at least partially agree. The thread has a “fruit of the poisonous tree” vibe to it now.
EDIT: comment doesn’t really make sense separated from the parent thread.
In this circumstance what we found was.
Other accounts here on the forum do not appear to be related in any way.
What change we will be making is to make these policies more prominent to new community members, to avoid this confusion in the future.
However, we did not see evidence of “a bunch of interested third parties” acting in bad faith in this thread, nor evidence of wrongdoing on NovaCustom’s part at any point, more importantly.
It would obviously be counterproductive to discourage companies/developers from posting here on this forum. Since this isn’t clear on our end I do not see a need to take any further action. Everyone involved helped resolve this problem very quickly.
Since the OP is not a representative of the project, this would not be appropriate.
1 - Why was the account still allowed to post before the verification process was completed? This misrepresented what the conversation was to users for days.
2 - When has ignorance of a rule be an excuse?
They were not. In fact i blocked that.
The original reply was (correctly) not allowed to be posted at all, which is why it only appears now.
The comment at NovaCustom launches privacy-friendly phone: SHIFTphone 8.1 with iodéOS - #90 by wessel-novacustom should not have been allowed by our moderators. This was a mistake on our end that we will need to address.
Realistically, if anything we should probably have some rule against posting links to unverified statements from “employees” of a topic being discussed on other forums like this comment did: NovaCustom launches privacy-friendly phone: SHIFTphone 8.1 with iodéOS - #67 by GorujoCY
I’m concerned this backdoor method of posting here defeats the purpose of our strict member verification rules:
If the discussion had waited for us to validate Wessel’s reply like it usually does, instead of turning into replying to a post on a different website, this “drama” could’ve been easily avoided.
Well I think that was mostly caused by the brand representative not responding to us. I guess you cannot prevent that and seems easy to debunk later.
I don’t think forbidding linking discussion threads from other places is a good idea as it seems overkill , and could becomes blurry quite easily.
You mentioned
it seems the person had been verified by Techlore, if that is not enough, then I would think the verified mark by other platforms such as Twitter, Reddit or Mastodon should also be ignored, unless you think some platforms do a better job than others. But then you will need to make a list, it seems to be a rabbit hole no one really wants to jump into.
I think an alternative could be, if it is technically doable, to add a triger when people are adding a link when creating or replying a thread, asking if they are affilated to the entity/ product being discussed, if they were, their reply will be put on hold for approval.
Actually I think it is an edge case where there is no need to introduce new policies to tackle, as the more rules we have, the more difficult the folks to follow and the moderators to execute, unless we can reduce or remove frictions by incorporating the policies into various workflows.
Only when they’re links to statements that are being made by a company/employee being discussed here, and the forum doesn’t belong to that company/employee.
(because we can trivially verify who owns a subreddit or social media profile from the footer of most organizations’s websites)
(because we don’t know if that Reddit profile actually has anything to do with Bitwarden) (it’s actually the same as above, we just have no way of knowing how Techlore verifies profiles if they do so at all, or how legitimate other forums are in general)Correct. The way we do verification here is that the project’s domain name or its source code repo are the only sources of truth. If someone wants to verify from a social media account, that account would have to be linked on their website in a way that clearly indicates it’s official. For the most part though, we verify people by ensuring their verified email address here on the forum uses a domain that matches their project.
I see your point, and it is fair to an extent.
However, it also seems like PG is prejudging members linking materials of that sort are in bad faith or will cause negative consequence, which I tend to disagree.
I think Community Moderation Basics already have adequate provisions i.e. Identifying “Bad Faith” Comments, to guide community members and moderators to identify potential issues.
In terms of negative consequences, if that’s a topic brought from somewhere else, it is likely that it is a hot topic at some corner in the internet, and if that source or claim has to be debunked, community members or PG Team would have the perfect opportunity to do so at that time. Banning sources of that sort would prevent PG community to learn and grow as a whole.
In this instance, it did brought up some really good comments from community members, which I very much appreciated
Afterall the “company representatives” are not saying anything directly in this forum so I don’t see impersonation is the concern here, moderators and staffs could always “remind” folks that “That Person in that place is not a verified company rep. in PG POV, treat the information with grain of salt and not to see it as the official response of the company”.
I wouldn’t think it is a loophole. In short, although I see your good intentions, I think PG community already has the tools (policies / procedures), wisdom and most importantly, moderation to manage this kind of situations.
As someone who is basically on the complete opposite side from @maltfield in the original SHIFTphone thread, I don’t think they should be banned, but I do think it’s important their relationship was disclosed. It seems to me like the relationship is indirect enough to the topic at hand that there was probably nothing nefarious happening with their intent and a ban would be a bit heavy handed IMO.
I would probably be more open to that idea if this was the only forum where this happened but as others have pointed out there seems to be a trend from @maltfield of not disclosing their COI.
The whole thing stinks and its suck to see a thread with such a disingenuous title and author get to stick around.
Personally I think @jonah is in a tough spot as it is seemingly hard to get devs to stick around on this forum, outside of just boosting their own project, so PG is forced to give them extra extra extra benefit of the doubt when they do happen to engage (even in bad faith).