KathyWdrf, good idea. I didn't think to check if there might be a FT or BFT member by that name. I don't have an EBay account so unless I sign up I don't suppose I could contact the person that way.

On reflection, I can see that it is probably far-fetched to implicate BFT in criminal activity, I got caught up in the heat of the moment. What is annoying is that BFT has this great data set, its somewhat of a community asset in that "we" collectively built the data - certainly myself included on many, many occasions - so there is some sense of community asset, community ownership there. BFT is the only people who can police its unfair use. Then this person comes along and, in my opinion, unfairly uses what is a community asset by selling on EBay the data (basically). I, as a user and contributor to this community, this data-set, I post my concerns - and - they're deleted.

The community stadard is that I can't even have some speech bandwidth to state my case and alert other community members as to what's going on and try to see if there's anything collectively we can do. As I said, I don't use EBay so I don't really know what could be done, I do know my colleague wrote to "Safe Harbor" with them and nothing has been done yet. In any event, I was turning to the BFT community looking for some help, and I really thought I was doing a community service by letting my fellow community members know what is going on.

For that, I get my helpful message to the community censored, and now, I am banned. And Sheryl puts the ban as an IP address ban so everyone where I work is banned, too. That's 4,500 people.

For someone trying to "help out" and maintain the integrity of the BFT community, that seems pretty ludicrous. I bet "in31122" probably is NOT banned, while I am.