Just wanted to add my "opinion", and that is that I consider Rick's forum a service to the hobby, and I don't believe for one second that the channels in question encrypted because of the post made over at Rick's forum. In fact, the message that immediately preceded the post suggested that the uplinkers were planning to encrypt soon.
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What makes much more sense to me, is that this is just one more attempt to attack Rick's forum for no good reason. I really sense that this may have been the intent here from the start, although that is just a guess on my part.
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But switching to the topic of censorship for a second, yes, posts got deleted over there, but I have seen much less censorship there than on any other forum I've read, including this one. I quit the Sadoun forum because of censorship, so I don't put up with moderators messing with my posts without good reason. I have posted messages over at Rick's, which were taken to be criticism of receivers he sells, but my messages were not censored. Rick has good reason for censoring posts which attack him and his forum and his business. There has been a long ongoing WAR between Rick's forum and Satforums. Satforums censors messages referring to Rick's forum, and Rick censors all messages referring to Satforums. While I understand the reasons behind both sides of this argument, I really think that the attacks here have gone above and beyond what is acceptable. Besides the verbal attacks, once there was even a post promoting denial of service attacks to Ricks forum, and the next day when I tried to read the forums, I found that BOTH forums were down for several hours.... may have been a cooincidence, but I wonder.
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Anyway, I really think that this WAR has gone on too long, and I hope that it doesn't drift over into this forum. The bottom line is that ever since TVRO forums popped up on the internet back around 1990, there have been two sub-cultures in the TVRO community, one that believes that all feed info should be kept secret because if "THEY" know we're watching, they will scramble, and the other group believes that if people don't share this info, then we as TVRO hobbiests will lose, because we will be missing out on free channels that we don't know are there. One group believes that scrambling is the result of their feeds being made public, the other group believes that uplinkers encrypt or don't encrypt based on what is convenient for them, not due to what they read on the internet.
Personally, I believe that it is best for the hobby to make the feed info available to all TVRO'ers, and I think that Rick's forum is a good thing for the hobby. I do agree that it might be better if the forums or subforums were somehow protected from being harvested via Google and other search engines, however there are two sides to that argument as well. I think the big issue here, besides how to get the most viewer hours out of these FTA feeds before they encrypt is that the TVRO/FTA hobby NEEDS to attract newcomers, or else there won't be enough market for dealers like Rick and others to sell receivers, dishes and other related items. For years, the hobby has been artifically supported by the pirate industry, ie we have been able to buy cheap receivers only because there was a big market for them as pirate receivers. Now, that market is probably drying up to a large extent, so the question then becomes how are we going to continue to find an affordable source of receivers if the only dealers are in Europe. We NEED US based dealers, but that just can't continue unless we can attract new people to the hobby to buy from these dealers. If this feed info is kept secret, then newcomers aren't going to buy a receiver and dish if they don't know what it can receive. Rick's forum and Lyngsat are really the only places on the web where a newcomer can get honest info relative to what's available free up there on sat.
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Just as an example of what a newcomer can encounter, back in the mid 90s, when people were starting to switch to 4DTVs and/or commercial receivers like the 4200, I wanted to upgrade to DCII capability, but I couldn't tell from the info open on the web just what I could get with these receivers. I was mainly interested in receiving PBS, which had just switched over to DCII, but I couldn't find out what could be received free, and what was encrypted. Luckily, I knew of an individual who sold both receivers, so I emailed him, asking him what could I receive with these receivers, telling him I was specifically interested in PBS, but said I was also curious what else was free. He told me that the information was available, but only on a secret forum, but that you couldn't join the secret forum unless you owned a DCII receiver. He wouldn't even tell me if you could receive PBS with the receiver. It was basically, buy the receiver, then find out what you could receive. Since he was familiar with my viewing habits from my forum posts, I asked him what he would recommend, and he recommended the 4200V, although he told me that before it could receive ANYTHING, that it would have to be authorized, and to do that, you needed to know someone associated with one of the uplinkers, who could put your UID into the DCII stream. So I took a risk and bought the 4200V, which cost ~ $1200 . I then joined the secret forum, and found out what was available, got my 4200 authorized, and I never regretted the purchase, however it really hit me that how many people are going to risk spending $1200 to buy a receiver, when they don't know if it will even receive anything. It worked well for me, but it really convinced me that these secret forums, that keep newcomers from seeing what's available are really not in the best interest of the TVRO hobby.
Anyway, personally, I don't post feed info on public forums, mainly because I like to read several different forums, and am trying to get along and follow the rules of the several different forums I read, and the easiest way to do that is to restrict my feed postings to just one place, so as not to make a mistake and be accused of stealing info from one place and putting it on another.
However, when I read all these attacks on Rick's forum, I really have to speak out, and say that I really think that these attacks are not warranted, and the attacks are doing a disservice to the TVRO/FTA hobby. And my honest "opinion" is that this particular attack was fabricated from the start. I may be wrong, but since I regularly read all three forums on a daily basis, that is the only conclusion I can come to.
to Satellitguys. Hope you make yourself comfortable because unlike other sites we like to have fun. If you have a opinion that we dont like we wont ban you for posting your views or delete your post. If that was the case a couple folks would have been banned and their posts nuked like nothing happened. 
