Schol-R-LEA wrote:
My view on this is that anyone who is interested in this topic is by definition a crank, so yes.
Let's define, for the purpose of this discussion, a crank as a person who is unwilling to change his stance on a specific topic, even when presented with overwhelming evidence against it
and without coming up with substantially new arguments to defend it. I don't think that everyone interested in a topic like OSDev is a crank. This forum has a lot of valuable contributors and people who developed great hobby OSes. The OSDev-related discussions usually go fairly well and stay on-topic and/or provide meaningful insights for newcomers. This does not hold for many of the the non-OSDev-related discussions though.
@nullplan and StudyCaps: I agree with you that blatantly swinging a banhammer on
posters is not a good idea. However, I dislike reading the same bad arguments in the same threads over and over again. This drives me away form those threads and ultimately also from the forum. I could imagine that this is also true for other good contributors. My suggestion would be to lock those threads rather quickly and only move to banning people if they keep opening such threads. This especially applies to people who do not contribute anything meaningful to on-topic OSDev discussion. People who post meaningful contributions start getting tired after a while when their arguments and posts are ignored while "cranks" get free reign to repeat their bullshit over and over since they do not seem to get tired so easily. I think that we can define certain non-OSDev topic to be out of scope for this forum. Sure, that is some form of censorship but that's totally okay - we want to be an OSDev platform and not a general purpose discussion board.
If I want to see stupid arguments and circlejerking, I can go to 4chan or /r/conspiracy or whatever. I am posting this because I do believe that this forum is a nice place for OSDevers and I want it to keep being a nice place. Sure, I can stop reading it but I'd rather like to keep reading it without running into conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. I know that when I became interesting in math and programming as a child / teenager, I was very interested in all those nice systems and theorems built by "giants". I was eager to learn about this knowledge instead of ignoring all its contents and postulating that it's all wrong and that I know better.
(Which does not mean that the is no value in skepticism. But skepticism has to be combined with rationality and it's not in those crank-fueled discussions.)
As a last point (that i already hinted at above), I do not think that we can have both a lot of good contributors and allow crankery at the same time. I can very well imagine that crankery drives away the good contributors.