Quote from: RFord on June 05, 2012, 05:51:40 AM
I can't help but notice that RonR has been absent from the OBi Forum for some time. Has he been banned from the forum? Maybe Michigan Telephone (asxhole) can shed some light on this issue, since he has waged a one-man war to have RonR ban from this forum.
I will admit that in his early days on this forum I thought he should be banned, simply because back then he was so inconsiderate to others, in my personal opinion. However, in my opinion he got better about that over time, and for the last few months my primary objection to him has been that I thought he was giving bad advice to new users, by telling them not to use the OBiTALK portal to configure their devices. Then he got on this kick about the non-existent (for all practical purposes) "back door" in Obihai devices, and went badmouthing Obihai on
BroadbandReports.com's VoIP forum. I suspect it was that last act, far more than anything I said, that took him out of the good graces of the people at OBiHAI. I did think, and still think, that it was pretty rotten of him to try and act as the "guru" in this forum, but go over there and try to scare a certain percentage of people into not buying an Obihai device. I cannot even fathom why he did that; it totally mystifies me why he would do such a thing given that so many people seemed to admire and respect him here.
When I realized he hadn't posted in a few days I knew it would only be a matter of time before someone accused me of driving him away. I rather doubt that, because all indications were that he totally ignored my posts. At least he never bothered to respond directly to anything I said. Even when I created a thread where people could post their reasons for using or not using the portal, and I tried to make it as neutral as possible, he ignored that opportunity to explain his reasons (maybe he really didn't have any good reasons, but if that was the case, that makes it even worse that he kept discouraging people from using the portal).
I have mixed feelings about him leaving. On the one hand, I realize that if he does not come back, we have all lost a valuable resource when it comes to explaining Obihai dial plans. On the other hand, I feel that we all may have become too dependent on him to explain those to us. If he had not been around in the early days, Obihai might have felt a bit more pressure to publish documentation that explained exactly how the dial plans work, in language that more of us could actually understand. But for so many months, we've all become accustomed to letting him spoon-feed us dial plans. To paraphrase the old saying, we have been begging him for fish, and he's been giving us the fish, instead of teaching us how to fish. He'd give us dial plans but rarely if ever explain why they needed to be done in a certain way. I don't fault him for that; he wasn't being paid to be our teacher. But now we are caught in a situation where he's not around, and we simply don't know why — you can blame me, you can blame Obihai, or you can blame it on the rain, but we actually have no clue as to why he's been MIA. It would have been nice if he'd posted some sort of note explaining that he was leaving, or going on vacation, or whatever, but perhaps he was unable to do that for some reason (and I think we all hope that nothing seriously bad has happened to him).
The flip side of this is that maybe more of us will be forced to figure out how the dial plans work, or maybe Obihai will get enough complaints (or even start losing sales) to inspire them to figure out some way to simplify the creation of more complicated dial plans. Certainly, the portal could be enhanced to allow some common tasks (like sending numbers matching certain pattern(s) to a different SP than the default). I will freely admit that I do not understand the dial plans the way he did, but that didn't stop me from performing a few basic modifications to get my devices working the way I want them to. It actually took me weeks to come up with a "recipe" that works as I want it to, but the thing is, I completely understand what it's doing and why it works, which I wouldn't if I'd just had him create a dial plan for me. That doesn't mean I can tell anyone else how to create a dial plan (unless they want to do EXACTLY the same thing I'm doing) but it does mean that if a person does a little digging, both in this forum and in Obihai's documentation, it is possible to figure this stuff out.
Finally, I will say that this is not the first time I have seen this sort of thing happen. As an example, without naming names, I can think of another situation where, in a forum for a particular piece of VoIP software, one guy because the "resident expert" but sometimes managed to tick off other forum participants. He held that position for many months, and then one day got into some kind of tiff with the forum moderators and just up and left (at least he posted a farewell message of sorts). I just get a really bad feeling when I see one person becoming the "resident guru" in a forum, particularly when he has a bit of an attitude, because sometimes these guys just have a tendency to up and leave. I won't try to psychoanalyze the situation because I'm not qualified to do that, but just saying this isn't the first time I've seen a "resident guru" up and quit (if that is indeed what happened here, and again, we just don't know at this point).
Everything in this post is solely my opinion, and nothing here should be taken as a statement of fact. Don't consider me a "reliable source" on anything, because I know as little about what actually happened as the rest of you.