Why are these changes being made without a specific discussion about the proposed changes first?
Every time I have seen talk of a criteria change, people have always been directed to make a thread focused on the criteria itself. Then to have a seperate discussion and have that change be approved first. It doesn’t seem like that is happening here.
To me it seems the precedent is clear that whatever criteria discussion went on in the remove proton thread should not have replaced the next step of discussing and debating criteria changes seperatly.
I’m marking as the solution because you are the final say but I think you are misunderstanding my concern…or am I just mistaken.
@jonah I was under the impression that criteria change had to be its own thread and that “community consensus” on the criteria could not be reached in a seperate tool discussion. As its basically two suggestions (a tool change, and a criteria change) in one thread. Which would usually be invalid.
Ah, I see what you mean. In this IVPN case I didn’t think there was much room for discussion, because not requiring a kill switch on iOS was the only possible outcome, otherwise we could never recommend a VPN?
The other proposed changes coming from the Remove ProtonVPN thread aren’t criteria change PRs, and I’m not sure if we are proposing another criteria change in that thread anyways yet. I think if we are going to change criteria based on a ProtonVPN discussion then yes indeed we will need to start a new discussion about it, but we aren’t at this point.
Instead I think the possibility of removing Proton VPN or adding a warning to it are both still on the table, which would make that removal thread still valid.
This decision has been rushed, and does not represent the opinion of most of the community.
This is NOT a clarification, in fact even @ph00lt0 rightfully pointed an issue, saying it was vague, and you just passed trough. (Yes, it was ultimately approved by two teams members, but both stated objections)
That was the only option expressed in the IVPN thread that would be consistent with our other criteria. We’ve never carved out exceptions for specific operating systems, we’ve only ever elevated our own recommendations.
To limit the exception to iOS simply because some people don’t like Proton would be intentionally biasing our criteria against Proton in particular, and would also be akin to marking iOS as an anti-recommendation, when we have consistently decided we don’t list anti-recommendations on our site. Limiting our minimum criteria to our own recommendations is the least possible biased way to go about this.
If you have an alternative suggestion for the criteria that addresses these points, and that isn’t already addressed in one of the 3 Proton-related threads currently open, feel free to make that suggestion. I suspect it will be the same as some currently being argued in those threads though.
@ph00lt0’s issue was entirely different from what you are saying, because it was only about the very first sentence, and it was a misunderstanding of the change anyways because he didn’t notice what was now “vague” had just become specifically addressed in the following line. You’re misrepresenting what the consensus was here.
Is this what the state of the discourse?
Falsely thinking you know an ulterior motive ?
You also just completely ignored the concern of a rushed change. It’s very clear that by making, and closing a PR in under 16 hours, most people haven’t had the change to comment on it.
The discussion was open since December with no negative feedback, so it is not contentious at all. The fact that you think there was a contentious discussion about this does indeed indicate to me you think the change was related to the Proton discussion, which is clearly not true because the Proton discussion remains open and ongoing regardless of this change.
It is in fact perfectly normal for changes to go from complete discussions here to closed PRs very quickly, because we do not have additional discussions on GitHub. We do not use GitHub as a place to gather even more feedback.
First, you closed that thread, then reopened it with the PR a week later. This is clearly not a transparent way of doing things, just open a new one clearly stating the change.
Second, no one in that thread argued that killswitches should only work, or even exist, only on platforms recommended by PG. So the change you made wasn’t based on any kind of feedback.
A change stating a client can only provide a killswitch insofar as the platform allows, would have been more scope. This is what I proposed this morning.
It is related to the Proton discussion. Under this new criteria, Proton doesn’t faul afoul of any criteria.
And no, it isn’t normal that PRs are closed very fast. Github clearly is the place for technical discussions about wording and scope. Also, you should allow time for people to comment on the forum, etc.
Edit: I really was ready to talk. But I guess closing down threads to shut down debates is standard now.
I linked to all the sources above where everyone agreed we should make an exception for iOS, and I’ve explained here to you why such an exception would have to be worded like this. Your proposal is an additional thing we are still discussing at What should we require of VPN providers on macOS? so this thread would not be the place to discuss that change.
If you don’t agree with the decision that we made then the only solution is to propose a better solution, not argue against past discussions. I think you already have proposed what you think is a better solution in that thread I just linked to, so that’s where we’re at now.
At this point neither of us have anything else to explain about our positions, so we can leave this here for other people to decide for themselves, and we can focus on making additional changes in the Site Development threads. That’s all we can do to keep things moving forward
