So,
In the space of a couple of weeks, the community has managed to find and implement working solutions for the GigaHub 2.0 that work with pfSense, OPNsense, and Ubiquiti routers.
So, to the “All Stars” who repeatedly insisted that this simply could not be done, it would appear that you were mistaken.
What is considerably more disappointing, however, is the way the discussion itself was handled by the moderators. Rather than moderating the people who were actually creating the hostility and disruption, moderators repeatedly removed or censored posts from those trying to challenge the accepted narrative and work toward a solution.
At times it genuinely felt less like a technical forum and more like being told that questioning the established position was itself the problem. I knew there was a workable answer, others knew there was a workable answer, and yet resistance, dismissal, and censorship seemed to appear at nearly every turn.
Obviously, not everyone who arrives with a new idea is Galileo. But you also cannot treat everyone who challenges the accepted wisdom as though they are some kind of heretic simply because their idea contradicts what the established voices have already decided must be true. Sometimes the person questioning the consensus is wrong. Sometimes they are the person who discovers that the consensus was wrong.
That is precisely why ideas should be tested rather than silenced.
Even after 30 years of working in IT, I still learn new things almost every day. Why, then, would anyone else in this field assume they have nothing left to learn?
Admitting that you do not know everything can be a humbling thing to do, particularly when you have years of experience behind you. But the sooner you accept that there will always be something you do not know, the sooner you become open to learning far more than you ever thought possible. Experience should make us more willing to investigate new ideas, not more certain that anything outside our existing knowledge must be impossible.
That is a deeply unhealthy way to run a technical community.
Progress depends on people being willing to question assumptions, test alternatives, and occasionally prove the prevailing wisdom wrong. A forum should encourage that process, not suppress it simply because it challenges what influential members or moderators believe to be true.
“Progress is rarely made by silencing dissent. It is made by allowing ideas to be tested, challenged, and proven.”
Perhaps next time, instead of discouraging people from searching for a solution, or censoring them when they refuse to accept “it can’t be done”, the better approach would be to help them find out whether it actually can.
And, frankly, I fully expect that once the moderators see this post, it too will be removed or censored like so many of the others, because criticism of the forum’s established hierarchy does not appear to be particularly welcome here.
If that happens, it will rather neatly prove the point.
And that, in itself, is a shame.
