In this circumstance what we found was.
- One employee of NovaCustom who did properly disclose their conflict of interest, but did not promptly respond to our request to verify their identity, which we additionally require for people claiming a founder/developer/employee role to prevent impersonators.
- One community member with a tangential relationship to NovaCustom who was not aware that our conflict of interest policy would strictly apply to this SHIFTphone discussion.
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.