[Gimp-user] The system of levels, badges and presents of Discourse

[Ralf Mardorf <silver bullet zoho com>]

By closing individual mailman mailing lists and replacing it with a
single forum, everything is under control of a single authority. There
even isn't the need to moderate or ban users with unwanted opinions,
since the users are educated by levels, badges and presents. IOW all
users are under general suspicion to express unwanted opinions, hence
everybody is moderated by a credit system. This Chinese alike approach
has nothing to do with the "libre" in FLOSS.

There are valid reasons to moderate or ban a user, but usually such a
user is barred by an individual part of a project, not by the whole
universe and before it happens a user must have expressed something that
is unwanted.

A credit system to stop individual opinions in the first place stops all
individual opinions completely. At the worst a "misbehaving" user gets
not only banned from one or the other part of the project, but from the
whole universe of the superior project.