OK. I'm back from what I needed to do. I will unlock the thread when I have finished responding here, and checked the outstanding reports, and reviewed the thread to see what I might have missed, and checked whether there is overspill into other threads. And I might even have some dinner at some point.
And when it's open, it will be a good place to discuss whether the organisers handled the situation well, implications of Pidcock's show of strength and Almeida's inability to follow him, and similar cycling related issues.
I will address some of the posts here individually.
First, I would draw attention to the post I put up while the riders were still in the neutralised zone.
MOD hat on:
It seems very possible that there will be disruption today from protests. Observations on the fact are reasonable: some frustration about it is understandable.
But if you want to give any opinion about the rights and wrongs of the protests, this is not the place. Do your venting on Twitter or elsewhere. This is a politics free zone.
In retrospect, I regret that I did not repost that as soon as the cancellation was announced, and that I continued trying to catch up from the earliest posted problematic posts rather than jumping to the end of the thread and giving a strong rule reminder. That's my main take-away.
As far as I could maintain a pattern to my actions while desperately fire-fighting, I issued the standard sanction for political comment where people cannot but have known that their comments were political in nature, and cannot reasonably have expected others to interpret them otherwise. I invite
@Cookster15 (who operates on Aussie time, but has strange hours within that, so I'm never very sure of when we will be on here together) to review those and unban any that he thinks I might have got wrong, and we can discuss such cases between us. Neither of us normally apply a sanction other than deletion without running it past the other: this afternoon I felt it necessary to act unilaterally to avoid delays.
I also deleted a large number of posts that were responses to that, or which sought to enter into discussions such as the definition of terrorism. That might be an interesting topic of conversation: it is not what a cycling forum is for. Some posts were deleted because they were orphaned responses to deleted posts, or responses to responses to ... etc: that has long been my usual way of dealing with such situations.
It was very disappointing that even when people must have noticed the amount of deletions and the "banned" label appearing next to names, they continued in the same vein and some who had stayed within expectations then went beyond them.
I repeat, in retrospect I would have handled the order I did things in differently, and had I done so maybe more people would have seen warnings not to do what they ought to know not to do anyway. As to the substance of what I did: I accept there may be minor gripes, but I believe I was acting in the interests of maintaining the standards set by those who make the forum available to us, and I will consider any responses to my actions that an aggrieved party may wish to raise in a PM (remember please, public discussion of individual acts of moderation are not allowed). But I am confident that I acted without bias in the issues that underpinned the protests (I have opinions probably as strong as most of you on the matter: I hope that none of you see evidence of what my opinion is from anything I have posted) and the best consistency I could apply in such a rearguard action.
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