Hi everyone, I am Sandra Fradet, co-founder and co-owner of RobotShop.
We have read lots of different versions of the recent events on the web. Now this is the time that you have our version.
On August 31 2015, we purchased www.letsmakerobots.com (LMR) from Frits, the former owner of LMR. LMR had become too much for Frits to take care of as a spare time project. Here is his take on things: "The idea was, that since I have not been building robots for a very long time, and it was hard to turn the site into something 'bigger' and still just do it as a spare time project - I thought it was a great idea to pass LMR on, and it appeared to be the right time to have a company focused on robotics, a company that had the muscle to implement new stuff and lift LMR - to have the key. I thought it was the best for everyone, I am not a big company, LMR was getting big and heavy, we needed a big and strong group to take over, I gave what I have, now is a good time for something new :)"
RobotShop was very excited to know more about the LMR community and did not do much for several days wanting to learn about the community and it's members and listen to their comments and needs. A few days after announcing the purchase, two LMR veterans had a heated argument in the shout box concerning another members work and not providing constructive feedback. This caused another member to create a new thread on how members should act at LMR. For a moment, we again just watched and listened to members, until it came evident that many members did not agree to the argument that happened publicly. We then entered the discussion proposing to members to be careful with feedback not to attack other members and also be careful with language since we want LMR to be family friendly and this is the impression we also received from several members of the LMR community. We did receive feedback that over the past 2 years, rough conversations were current and conversations they thought should not have been put public, were found in the shout box and forum. Other members mentioned that they would never refer this site to their niece, son or daughter because of that. Many members told us they wanted a place without vulgar language.
At this point, other members expressed themselves mentioning that this is not the way LMR was and should be. There were two sides, one wanting to clean up the language and the other smaller group wanting to continue as it was before. After LMR moderators added new rules concerning language similar to the ones found on many blogs and forums, in the middle of the afternoon, a group wanting to test RobotShop’s limits, started shouting obscenities in the shoutbox. Including very large versions of words we will not speak of and links to websites that should not be visited by people under 18. This was at the view of all LMR members entering the community. Later that day, it was decided that RobotShop, being a family friendly website with customers being young students, teachers and research institutions, unfortunately could not keep this type of obscenity at view. It was therefore decided to temporarily shut down the shout box in order for us to be able to program an On/Off functionality for our members to be able to turn the shout box on at their convenience. It was a difficult decision and we knew that some people would not approve but, we had to implement the changes quickly for the good of LMR.
The temporary removal of the shout box unfortunately caused members to be very upset even if this was temporary. After 24 hours the shout box was back on with the needed functionality. During the time the shout box was down, RobotShop started seeing some veteran members deleting their content in a way of protestation, and writing messages indicating that they would leave and create another community. A few accounts were therefore blocked temporary as a safety measure so we could take the time to understand what was happening and all these members were contacted individually in order to ask more information. Some content was restored during the weekend in order to allow time for LMR members and RobotShop to discuss while limiting the damage done to posts and people linking to this information. During this same weekend, a few former LMR members claimed that Robotshop was stealing their content on social media and alleged that RobotShop was banning members and deleting their content for no apparent reasons. None of this is true.
All accounts of these members were opened 48 hours later and they were free to rejoin the LMR community as long as they followed the new rules concerning language. No users were ever banned from LMR. Some users continued to protest on LMR and continued to share unfounded accusations that we were taking their content in hostage, stealing their IP and destroying the community. Even with excuses and explanations, the group did not want to hear our side of the story and did not provide us with a fair chance. Some users then decided to leave the LMR community and asked that their account and content be deleted from the LMR website. LMR moderators therefore, at the demand of members, removed accounts and content, even if we knew the damages it will cause to the quality of contents (holes everywhere in the forum threads). We are very sorry that members decided to leave LMR and at that point, it was undeniable that we needed to make things clearer for our members and protect us for the future by adding Terms and Conditions to the LMR website since there were none in place.
The risks and liabilities to an individual who owns a website are not the same as those of an international company like RobotShop, particularly for a site that focuses on user-generated content (UGC). In order to help us ensure that the content posted on LMR respects the rights of third parties, and to better protect our LMR contributions, we need the flexibility to modify or delete content if necessary while keeping the original substance of the posts. We understand that LMR members have spent considerable time, effort and energy in creating and publishing the content that now makes up the heart and lifeblood of the LMR website. Then, in order to ensure that LMR can continue to thrive, proper "Terms and Conditions" needed to be put in place. Unfortunately, the new terms created confusion and some members continued to accuse us falsely of wanting to take ownership of their content. This caused other members to decide to leave the community and ask to remove their content. Our Terms and Conditions were quickly improved to add common language so members can better understand our intentions. Our T&C are very similar to other popular websites like Instructables (Autodesk) and Thingiverse (Makerbot) and users do remain the owner of their content. It was always our intention since the beginning that the creators of the content remained the owner.
We are here to help the LMR community grow and prosper. For what other reasons would we have purchased Let’s Make Robots? In order to be able to do this, we will invest in the LMR platform and add more functionality in order to increase the quality of service offered to our members and guests. We want to help and get to know others and inspire the next generations of robot builders. In these events, we have not had the chance yet to show this to the LMR community and this is unfortunate.
We have been helping customers with their robotic projects for over 12 years now. We help people materialize their ideas and projects and these projects always remain the property of our customers. If you search RobotShop on the web, you are likely to find many positive comments on unbiased sites.
Don’t make any mistake, LMR has been hit badly by the mass deletion and this is regrettable. Could we have handled it better? Probably. We have admitted to it and nobody is perfect. But in the end, users asked to delete their content and we obliged.
We took a step back for sure, but we are confident that we will rebuild this community together, for a greater future. We now sit on a slightly smaller but solid base of core members. We have approximately 20 000 members in the whole history of LMR. 2000 members are currently active and we attract new members every day. LMR is still the biggest robot builder community on the planet and with Robotshop taking the reign, we are confident that we will bring it to the next level. We do feel that we can continue with a family friendly website where everyone young and old can come learn and share about robotics with other members. We do feel this is what the majority of robot builders want. We want to inspire the new generations and bring more people to become more interested in technology. Our intentions are honorable and we do want the good for LMR as many other members do. We have several ideas for the future which I am sure you will like but, we also want your input. We want to create an environment where people share about their passion, robotics, which is also RobotShop's passion by the way. We see a place where people help each other and where those who help others are recognized. We see a friendly environment with constructive feedback between members and where everyone is welcome.
At LMR, We are all Robots Builders.
