Prepared to leave?

In JRoller TOS, Hani proposes several rules for the upcoming(?) Terms Of Service of JRoller.com, the new domain name of FreeRoller.net. I understand he has to be provocating, otherwise there won't be anything left in his blog. Let's take some of his proposals.

No non-English blogs. That's right. I don't care if you like to blog in Arabic, Spanish, or German. Do us all a favour and blog in English. That way you don't end up hogging valuable space on the frontpage with your gibberish.

I don't care if someone can't read me, if I choose to write in French most of the time now, it's because what I say is completely uninteresting for an "English-reading" reader. And why should the frontpage please Mr. Bile in particular? By the way, this frontpage is ugly and useless, with its "Most popular weblogs" like a JDJ poll.

You are required to make at least 1 in every 5 posts vaguely java-related.

Either you say JRoller is for Java blogging, and 20% is insufficient, or you say that people are free to blog what they like and thus the 'J' in JRoller is a bit awkward. Evenif talking about Java on freeroller.net was an evidence from the beginning when you look at the first registered users, it has never been a written rule. Just consider one people, Anthony Eden, initiator of FreeRoller: at the beginning, his blog was named "All Things Java", then he found out that his blog wasn't enough about Java, he renamed it "All Things", recently he left FreeRoller, and the reason was not about Java. From what I understand, Anthony made FreeRoller as a showcase for RollerBlogger, not to build a community of Java speaking blogger, which is the purpose of JavaBlogs, an entirely different system.

If TOS like that are imposed tomorrow, then I should start to pack. This would be difficult since the possibility to export all the posts has beeen removed several months ago, when this functionnality was killing the server when used. Some times ago, Chiara was wondering if this place was for her: the answer lies in the hands of the people who can impose TOS on JRoller.

Comments

1. On Wednesday 15 October 2003, 18:45 by Rick Ross

You have no need to worry at all about Hani's regime being imposed. I suppose some people find him to be clever, but I just hear the voice of an angry, unkind person who apparently has an axe to grind for every issue. I found the "english only" comment to be especially small-minded and probably reflective of his true nature more than most would care to admit.
In any case, you can be quite sure that Hani has no role whatsoever in determining what we will do, when we will do it, or why.
Rick

2. On Thursday 16 October 2003, 01:31 by Damien

Thanks for the info :-)