Yet from a promoter of a product, 'crusading' about the positives was seen as OK
That's not crusading - that's spruiking. That's a very different behaviour and it has its own problems. We deal with that differently. As I said before, these days we would probably be much more strict about it than we were back then. The spruikers never chased you up, posting in every thread that you did, trying to get their message across to you. They didn't challenge you at every turn trying to tear you down.
My definition of crusading is the continual badgering of a person by someone who just can't let something go. People who just can't move on. People who can't just have their say and then leave it be. They simply must "prove" their point and continue to post on a subject over and over - sometimes to the point of virtually stalking the subject of their displeasure. If they can't accept that perhaps there is more to the story than their point of view.
And it looks like you are still doing it, many years after the event. Please Bill, move on. Don't let this eat you up like it obviously has. It really doesn't matter anymore - it's in the past, leave it be.
You still do not get it.
There is some bias in the moderation, yet those moderating sometimes don't see it from their personal perspective because they have judged one side (internally, probably even subconsciously) of the argument to be 'good' and the other side 'bad'.
Sorry, with several exceptions of taboo subjects, we do not judge the topic of the discussion. We judge the actions of the posters.
The complaints I had about you were your crusading. It was about the way you posted, not what you posted. Heck, I agreed with some of your assertions (but not all of them). That's not the point. It was the badgering, the harassing, the potentially libellous posts. It wasn't that you disagreed, it was how you did it.
Same story with Thommo - as I've tried to explain to you and him before ... it's not his negativity I have a problem with, it's the way he posts and the attacks he makes. It's the behaviour, not the content.
Yet here you are STILL defending the totally biased side of the argument.
I'm not defending anything. I haven't talked about the fund at all. I've talked about your actions, your behaviours.
You still do not see that there should have been far MORE discussion of the possible negative side of an unproven product that was shamelessly being promoted. You STILL call the side that was "Wake up and look people" as the negative, crusading, trolling side of the argument.
Should have been? That's a subjective matter. It's your opinion, and you are welcome to it. And you certainly did get to air those opinions at the time. You got plenty of opportunity to express your concerns. You got a platform to discuss the possible negative sides of a product.
But there are two critical things you still don't seem to understand.
1) it was a "possible" negative side. In the same way that someone is "alleged" to have committed a crime, our law relies on the basis of "innocent until proven guilty". The exact the same reasoning that you use to base your complaints on (it was an unproven product), can be used by both sides of the argument. You can't prove the bad performance of the product for exactly the same reason that the promoter can't prove the good performance. Because it is untested. The best anyone can do is model predictions based on back-testing. This is the same for any new financial product of this nature, no matter who is promoting it.
2) the POINT is that you don't hold an open license to totally slam a product in advance because you cannot prove that it will not perform. It is libellous to assert that a product WILL do (or not do) something without evidence to back that up. Sure, once a product has failed to perform, you can pull out the real data and say "hey look - it didn't do what it was supposed to do" - that's based on fact. But just because you don't THINK it will work, doesn't mean it won't. Just because you don't LIKE a product, doesn't mean you have the right to attack it at every turn.
Sure, you can express your concerns and urge caution - and you and many others did. There's nothing wrong with that - anyone spruiking on an open discussion forum needs to be prepared for that ... it is part of the healty debate. Most of those posts still remain on this forum today and will show up in search results (I just Googled and found plenty of your posts on the subject still there!). But you took it way too far.
The product itself doesn't matter, it could be a new ETF for all I care - the principal is the same. You launched a sustained and unprovoked attack on a person and product which you took a dislike to, to the point where it became a legal issue (and still is - years later!). Indeed, I seem to remember similar problems with you and another fund spruiker on this forum as well - different fund, different person, same behaviour from you, same outcome for all of us - legal issues.
What I actually never have understood is why it was all so important to you.