[Galaxy S II General] Hacre:
I think you'll find that open dissent of admin/moderator decisions causes censure. You appear to have a forum owned by the XDA team confused with a democracy. If you want a democracy then approach XDA about a subscription system, then you'll have a right to comment on what your "tax dollars" are used for.

Yes. The things gone awry are:

A: That every single user/poster/pleb/abortion justification thinks they're a unique snowflake and that their opinion matters or that it should in any way have a right to free speech regardless of how inane that opinion is.

B: More people have caught on that ROM development gets a following and donations in form of real cash and want a piece of the action and as such the number of ROMs that are little other than a theme or a couple of tweaks has exploded.

Thank god you were here, we were in danger of no one ever posting anything ever again.

Where to begin with this one. First of all, as I said earlier, you have these forums confused with a democracy. XDA don't have to consult anybody outside the people that either pay actual money to run this place, or people that have had such decision making responsibility delegated to them. You and anyone else whining here are neither so I find your sense of entitlement along with your 16 thanks and small number of posts completely baffling. XDA is provided to us for free, the people that moderate the forums do so on a purely voluntary basis. Guess what genius, changes made to the forums are done to make the job of the volunteer easier, not to suck the phallus of every idiot that might otherwise post a big ranty post about how unfair life is and how XDA have displeased them and upset the balance of their otherwise zen basement dwelling.

So when butthurt individuals then post threads to air their utterly worthless opinion and when those threads are clearly inflammatory in their language and as a result further responses to those threads are at least as inflammatory if not more so, it is the responsibility of the moderators to close those threads since it's their job to ensure that forum rules are adhered to. No volunteer wants to keep an eye on a thread that's telling them just what a lousy job they're doing.

Actually I think you'll find that the moderators and admins will do what makes the most sense to them and take the option that appeals to them the most. This is their right. Again you're involving politics where there are none. Moderators weren't elected by users of XDA because we've done absolutely nothing to deserve the right to elect them. What you call politics, I call forum drama which has no place in XDA and such will and should be removed by a moderator with extreme prejudice.

Let me make this point clear: Whenever the XDA staff ask for our opinion, that is a privilege we've been given temporarily, not a right to hold onto and post about whenever a forum layout gets changed and people with nothing better to do decide to create endless QQ threads to tell a bunch of volunteers just what they think of their decision and the questionable sexual activities of their maternal ancestors.

I'm sure the moderators are losing lots and lots of sleep because tomj777 and a few other gene pool rejects are most displeased with the free service we get from them. No, really.

I say you have an over inflated sense of entitlement and ego who has absolutely no idea what's involved in keeping a place like XDA running smoothly.

Why not? Top tier developers, after the XDA staff, are what keeps XDA running. Without the people that break bootloaders, root ROMs, customise stock ROMs, build new ROMs from source, submit patches to the AOSP tree and generally add to the whole that is Android development, then all the people currently typing their furious OMG MODS HAO CUD YOU DO THIS TO US through their tears wouldn't have anywhere to go or any reason to feel they can complain. You're absolutely right to separate the wheat from the chaff and clearly mark who actually contribute and those who merely just tweak someone else's work and attempt to pass it off as their own.

The community already has a voice you idiot, it's called the New Thread and Reply to Thread buttons. Issues with a moderator decision should be taken up with moderators via a PM not cried about in multiple threads because all you're really after is the same thing the "derivative" creators want, lots of "me toos" and a false sense of self worth bestowed upon you by people that don't matter a jot.

You'd have a point, if Android was under the GPL and if people commented/preserved comments on source code and/or kept license agreements intact. However they don't.

Donations aside, people don't get paid for the work they do, so that leaves only the gratification of recognition for their work. When some jumped up oik with a file browser and a zip tool comes along and takes that work, does little of anything to improve it then attempts to pass a release off as their own, people are going to understandably get upset. If you created a masterpiece sculpture or painting, then I took a mould/photocopy of it, added a funny nose somewhere then claimed I'd created the whole thing, that would be first class plagiarism and I'd fully expect you to be annoyed about it.

Ah the joy of the opinion that doesn't fully understand open source. Open source still gives credit where it is due and again you're working on the premise that everything is released under the GPL when it is not.

However what you're further failing to understand is that we're not discussing software licensing here, we're discussing the rules of the distribution node which in this case is XDA. To use XDA for free they have rules that they expect you to adhere to. Since this is largely a user driven community, it makes sense for XDA to want to make their key contributors happy. That includes frowning upon people that take the work of actual contributors, changes a few things here and there, then attempts to pass all of that work off as their own and thus invariably bigger and better than those things before it.

Wow what a genius you are. What a fantastic idea. Piss off and devalue all the people that actually contribute original work to the forum while molly coddling people that had they dribbled down their mum's leg instead of by random chance becoming a consumer of oxygen we'd be no worse off.

Derivatives are just that, a derivative of the original. This means without the original they would not exist and therefore they rank lower than the original. See how that works?

Without the XDA staff, XDA would not exist or continue to exist. Without actual developers, XDA would not exist or continue to exist. Without people taking and making bare minimum modifications to existing work...XDA would continue to exist.

That's where derivative work is in the food chain, near the bottom, one step above the people that seem to think their opinion matters when it comes to the running of the forums (only a teeny tiny step above at that, imagine if you will a tide mark of ****, you're in over your head, derivative "developers" just about have their noses above the tide line, still fully aware of the smell of **** but just about surviving).

My two cents on the subject of the forum split. It was a good idea. Naturally, or the XDA staff wouldn't have done it. For anyone now thinking I'm just sucking up to the XDA staff, feel free to ask Pulser or EgzThunder how likely that scenario is especially when the staff do actually do something stupid.

This is not one of those times. The main SGS2 development forum and other forums for the new mobile handsets now that the smartphone has become popular, are overly cluttered and quite frankly inundated with work that only takes two minutes to knock up and thus drowning out the actual work being done.

Count yourselves lucky, XDA would have been fully justified in moving all those threads to a derivative section and then ****canning the whole thing. They didn't, so be grateful. The wannabe developers get to play around in their own murky little sandbox and their deluded fanboys get to continue to virtually fellate them via posts and donations.

That's all well and good, however the people that make all that possible, deserve a nice clean pristine area where they can continue to work and actually contribute to the community without their work being lost among the umpteen hundredth thread for a ROM that has a new battery icon.

If the derivative makers had just released their stuff as themes, this wouldn't be an issue and they'd probably likely get more followers. They didn't, oh dear, how sad, nevermind. This problem was created by you the community, XDA are now doing their job and clearing the damn mess up.

Incidentally, I'm under no illusion that my opinion counts for more than XDA's either. It does however carry more weight than the plethora of whining idiots in this thread, purely from the fact that I'm one of the many that actually contributes to the community. So shut your ungrateful whining.