ANSWERED Linking the VPN identity to the forum ID is a bit dangerous.

[GaryUnwin 7]

https://airvpn.org/mission/ states

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Circumvent censorship and any other barrier to seek, receive and impart information and ideas without interference and regardless of frontiers (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, art. 19; ECHR art. 10)

On reddit, some people claim that their VPN IDs (and their real IP address) were banned (without refund in some cases) for asking technical questions on the forum or revealing their beliefs on the forum.

It's possible that these people were paid to lie about Air VPN. I don't know whether AirVPN actually censors customers according to their beliefs, but it is capable of doing so because it links VPN ID with forum ID.

I think VPN should be a neutral tool that serves everyone including misled people and bad people. I know most people are already unwittingly immoral in some ways. So, if a VPN provider bans people for their beliefs, most customers can be banned any time.

The reason that I say this is that the only way to prevent knowledge and tools from falling into wrong hands is to make it available to everyone including good people and evil people. VPN should be a neutral tool available to everyone.
If VPN is made available to smaller groups of people, you cannot prevent the possibility that it eventually falls into wrong hands (i.e. power pyramids). Many tools including guns have already fallen into wrong hands because they are not available to everyone.

If knowledge differential and tool availability differential increase, they create dangerous power differentials among people. Censorship creates knowledge differential which will create power differential.

If AirVPN workers have access to what their VPN customers think on the forum, they can discriminate customers according to their beliefs. It's better for VPN workers to not know what their customers think.

How do we make the world a better place, then? We can make the world a better place by teaching morality and freedom to people. You educate people, or you support people who do. Censoring bad people does not have the effect of teaching morality and freedom. On top of that, because most people don't have knowledge due to widespread censorship, we often end up thinking good people are bad people. Just let bad people use VPN to find more information. If they have access to the right information, then there is a chance that they will become moral through knowledge of morality and freedom. Most bad people are bad because they don't have knowledge of morality. Also, I prefer exposing bad people rather than censoring bad people. Being aware is better than burying things in the dark.

Don't punish people for what they think because 1) most people don't have enough knowledge to figure out who is good or bad and 2) punishing people for their thoughts prevents learning through conversation and 3) having a thought by itself is not a sin. When bad people take bad actions, then they can be punished through "self defense".

In practice, you can have an ID for forum activities and another ID for VPN usage, though.

[Staff 9765]

Hello!
 

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On reddit, some people claim that their VPN IDs (and their real IP address) were banned (without refund in some cases) for asking technical questions on the forum or revealing their beliefs on the forum.
It's possible that these people were paid to lie about Air VPN. I don't know whether AirVPN actually censors customers according to their beliefs, but it is capable of doing so because it links VPN ID with forum ID.

This forum is for the community by the community, so we read just a few messages in suggestions, troubleshooting and reviews. In the last weeks we have tried to focus more on the community forum but it's not possible that we follow everything. Moderators exist, they are from the community itself, they operate for passion and they have no ties or remuneration from AirVPN. If a moderator acts in a way that's considered wrong, any user can contact us. This happened two or maybe three times in 13 years, showing how good the moderators are.

Being paid to lie about a VPN is common business in our sector and we have also received ransom requests: pay this or I will write bad things about AirVPN. Or even, pay this and I will delete this negative comment about your VPN and/or I will write a positive one. Needless to say we never pay these parasites and we never paid any review.

Bans against IP addresses are only a consequence of a perimeter defense against various attacks (example: an IP address fails dozens of login attempts in a very short time) and anyway they are automatic and temporary. Yes, in so many years we have seen a couple of blatant lies on Reddit about this but they were fabricated, anyway they seem (if we're not wrong) just a couple out of the million customers we have had in 13+ years. Some hidden, or not so hidden, agenda, we guess, maybe just to try and collect a couple of bucks. By the way after 13+ years we're still here, alive and kicking, in spite of their vile lies.

Another possible source of ban is when your computer is infected by spamware. In this case your account will post without your knowledge the typical porn, pharma, lottery links and nonsense. In such cases it may happen that the account is prevented from writing on the forum as it's not discernible from the horde of spambots around. A simple ticket or an e-mail will re-enable the account, after the computer has been cleaned.

Anyway, don't take this forum as a tool for freedom of expression in general. We offer different tools to express your freedom of expression (we support Mastodon, PeerTube, Tor, XNet, WikiLeaks, we run Tor nodes and so on). Each community forum must not go off-topic after all and flames are not allowed. But we have an "Off Topic" forum which is suitable for many different topics, yes.
 

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In practice, you can have an ID for forum activities and another ID for VPN usage, though.

Exactly, another clue showing that the cited claims are ridiculous. If we really were totally crazy and wanted to act as per the defamatory claims you cite, we would not allow writing by non-customers. Or maybe we would not have created a forum for the community by the community, in the first place!

Kind regards
 

[GaryUnwin 7]

Thanks for clarification.