Eric's forum is a rough place

I joined Eric Dubay's forum in order to better understand his flat earth model. I wanted to faithfully and carefully include aspects of it in my new story. He has a post on there saying something along the lines of "Read this before you get banned". It basically says that if you're not a committed flat earther, don't start new threads, and if the thread isn't about flat earth research, don't start a new thread. It also indicates a designated thread for questions.

There's also a thread where apparently you can introduce yourself.

It also warns not to ask any questions without doing a diligent search of the forum to see if your question has been answered or not.

For what it's worth I thought Eric's flat earth model was interesting and it's the model that I'll mostly be basing my story on. There are many different flat earth models out there believe it or not.

I did what I felt was due diligence in trying to find out if my question had been answered yet or not and I didn't find it.

At any rate I simply introduced myself in the introduction thread as someone who was interested in learning more about the flat earth theory, and that I wanted to write about it in a story and do so faithfully.

In the designated question thread, I asked what accounted for the directionality of up and down when Eric's model does not include gravity as does the globe model. His idea seems to be that dense things sink and less dense things float, but I've never heard him say in any of the interviews I've listened to with him what accounts for why things float "up" or sink "down" or why up is toward the sky and down is toward the earth.

I was honestly curious about this, and if it was a robust scientific model, even an unconventional one, there should at least be a hypothesis to account for this. In a globe model, directionality is determined by gravity. Things fall "down" to earth because gravity pulls things in the direction of the earth (a massive object that warps space around it). Without gravity though, I wanted to know what accounted for this directionality that we observe.

I was apparently instabanned. I came back a couple of hours later only to discover I'd been banned from Eric's forum. I can't say I'm very surprised, but I am disappointed. Even though I'm not a flat earther myself, I wanted to find out more about his model and the ideas he has about various things we can observe. I came to the forum with an open mind willing to learn. I didn't come to ridicule them or pass judgment or call their ideas archaic, etc. I genuinely just wanted to find out what their model was so that I could faithfully write about it and understand on a human level where they were coming from.

I've joined another forum in an attempt to get some more clarity to help me with my story but I still find the fact I can't even read Dubay's forum now to be a bit of a disappointment. I shouldn't have tried to ask a question apparently.