rogerd - 1:58 pm on Jul 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

That's a major tech fail. Hard to understand why the operator would do that, particularly since it's not exactly Fort Knox he's protecting. If it's a spam prevention measure, it's like trying to solve a mosquito problem with a bazooka. The collateral damage will be orders of magnitude bigger than the problem.

I'm guessing that you will be one of many departing, lammert. Many people don't have fixed, or even rarely changing, IP addresses.

From a community management standpoint, here are a couple of questions:

1) Did the operator communicate about the change in advance or at least when it was implemented?

2) Did members comment in public on the change, and were those comments acknowledge (or deleted)?

Sometimes changes occur for a reason (though this one seems mostly pointless) and in those cases communication is key. Maybe those who run communities here can learn from your bad experience, lammert.