[semanticist]

Your community site obviously has very different goals than Hacker News. Hacker News's primary value is in having a very high signal:noise ratio - the only way that can continue is by having a very strong community-enforced standard for what counts as 'noise'.

Your community site, I'd guess, is largely about providing support for parents and family of cadets - that's an entirely different set of goals and requires an entirely different set of community values.

It would be a mistake to assume that all communities on the internet behave the same way.

[10smom]

Agreed. But it is still does not make it appropriate or right to question one intention, publicly, on a site that is set up for s specific purpose, with out finding out info about them, and to flame them if they think their intention are other than what the site is here for, and to pile on by down voting all of ones post, even from days ago.

[semanticist]

I disagree most strongly. It absolutely does make it appropriate to question your intentions because you were behaving in a manner which went against the long-established norms of this site.

I imagine that anti-war activists probably aren't very welcome on your military cadet site. If I appeared and talked about how the war in Iraq and Afghanistan is illegal and US troops keep shooting civilians and their allies, it wouldn't be very popular.

People might question my intentions, publicly, on a site that is set up for a specific purposes. They might read back over other comments I'd made that were more borderline and read them with a new context, where they were simply being ignored before.

Ultimately, you behaved inappropriately and don't seem to want to acknowledge that. You created this issue and have fanned the flames to make it worse.

Perhaps this is a really important lesson to learn for your business too: when you screw up, own the mistake. Don't try and weasel your way around it, admit it fully and completely and talk about how you can improve to ensure it doesn't happen again.

If you can't even do that on a discussion site, I wouldn't want to trust that you'd do it when you make a mistake in your business.