In post 89- you linked to 'Duderdude2’s thread about ip hiding. (from 2002 - so its clearly not a hotbed of discussion). This is the only link (that I see) in this thread that you have provided.
In Charlies LOCKED thread, there is no such discussion.
You stated that IF charlie wanted to discuss IP hiding, his thread would be similarly locked - which may have been part of the conversation in the PMs, but in his ACTUAL thread, there was no such discussion (yet).
In this thread - there has already been plenty of GOOD discussion on the topic - such that its clear that GOOD discussion could have been maintained in the OP’s Original, now locked thread - had the thread been allowed to mature.
Face facts - you locked his thread based on his PM and POSSIBLE content - not on any ACTUAL content. Content that clearly can be discussed in a factual manner without the need to point to any specifics providers, etc.
So, while you had good reason to deny his request based on his PMs - there was no valid reason to close the actual thread in question.
Go read Charlie’s post again, especially the middle part where he talks about using a VPN service. This is specifically the part that is excluded from the GQ VPN thread.
You obviously are going to believe what you want to believe regardless of what I say, so that’s my last word on the topic.
I think I finally parsed the 2 sentences in the middle of the original OP that you are referring to - the two where he is factually wrong about what a VPN (in general terms, not a specific service may or usage thereof) provides.
And the point still stands - the topic you didn’t want discussed is in this thread openly discussed - the world still revolves - that thread could have been moderated to prevent open discussion of a trivially well known ‘service’ and we could have had one thread to fight the ignorance of the OP.
(In case it wasn;t clear - I now ‘see’ the very small detail in the original thread of the OP that the ECG so vehemently wanted to close the thread due to - if he had pointed that out earlier, I would still call it a BS ruling, but I would have dropped it much sooner)
For what it’s worth, there’s a moderately prominent security/privacy blogger called “That One Privacy Guy” who has published a fairly comprehensive spreadsheet comparing VPN providers, and logging (yes/no, logging of which activities) is one of the major criteria for evaluating them. [link removed]
I have removed the link from spinky’s last post. One thing we did not want to do in these VPN threads is post the names of companies that provide these types of services.
Those who wanted to discuss VPNs have been able to discuss more than we feel comfortable with here on the SDMB already. Since this keeps pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable here, this is closed.