In another forum a poster recently came on and challenged myself and a couple of other authors on the chapters we had written in a popular series of books that deal with our hobby. The moderators in the forum felt he was being disruptive and insulting and after a couple of warning banned him from the group.
I felt that his questions and challenges were all fair game and deserved to be addressed. He implicated plagerism as well as less than proffessional testing procedures. The other authors involved were in agreement that he should be banned and that behavior like this should not be tolerated.
I felt like we were all reading different posts as nothing he said struck me as being anything but a challenge. He was specific enough in his challenges to allow us to address every issue he brought up. Someimes he appeared to be beating a dead horse but even then I felt he changed the wording or the question just enough to still be considered a legitimate question. Basicaly I saw someone who was looking for doctorate quality research from a bunch of guys doing backyard hobby level research, but none the less I thouroughly enjoyed his challenges and felt he gave us an opportunity to go into more detail about how we arrived at our conclusions.
Typicaly how do authors normally respond to serious challenges?
This was what I considered a gray area. He would qualify by saying I suppose someone could have come to the same conclusions doing their own research. My view is that the areas he was reffering to have been addressed by any number of authors with overlapping conclusions, very hard to give credit on something so commonly addressed each with a slightly different take.
Reproducing a conclusion through independent research isn’t plagiarism. If the conclusion is important, it might be publishable confirming data. If it is not so important, it is “oh crap, I can’t publish that.” In academics that is, a hobby is different.
Sounds like the guy was banned for being a jerk in keeping on bugging you after the warnings.
He was a bit aggressive. I wrote him a private email and encouraged him to continue his line of questioning. Only a very small part was directed at me. I have gotten to know him a bit better over the past few days. Not such a bad guy but a bit odd. I found his line of thought was based very heavily on computer modeling rather than working models. If they would have allowed him to continue he would have shot himself in the foot and the author under the bulk of the critique could have easily come out looking fine. I enjoy his curiosity but find his reliance on computer modeling a bit bothersome as he lacks a general understanding of the dynamics involved in building bows.