When I was invited to blog for SLI, one of the very attractive parts of it was that despite the blog being owned and operated by AOL, nothing was sacrosanct. I was told that I would be entirely free to blog anything that I wanted to blog, and that would include criticising SL, Linden Lab, AOL, whatever I saw fit.

I have always liked organisations that can accept criticism, and which are big enough to allow criticism of their operation. I think it is a mark of a mature organisation that it can allow others to criticise and respond openly to that criticism. The Quakers attracted me with one of their Advices and Queries, which are things for members to think about, not proscriptive things-one-must-do, which suggested: "Think it possible you may be mistaken". For "you" read you, me, anyone and us.

I understand that blogs have to ban people who persistently post porn or commercial links or advertisements to viagra etc. But I hate the idea that we have banned someone for making comments we disagree with on the comments to the blog, especially when it seems to me that some of the postings concerned deliberately provoked the comments.

I wasn't informed that we had banned Prokofy; I discovered this from his own blog. I haven't heard yet the justification, and suppose I should restrain myself on this until I have received a reply to my request for information, in case there is something I haven't understood about the situation. This is supposed to be a team blog, but I have not been part of this decision, and I want to make that clear, because it conflicts with my belief in freedom of speech and not censoring people who say things that we find disagreeable.

I am not sure that I will be able to stay here if censorship and not allowing criticism has become part of SLI. You may well find me migrating to VTOR if I don't get satisfactory answers to my questions.