Thanks dogman, for a little insight into the process and the thinking, and to all the mods for their effort in this difficult process.
I've been involved with various forums and other similar venues and it is a difficult job. In one case they harshly separate product discussions from vendor discussions. A posting in the product review area that talks about vendors is removed. This seems to work well.
Vendors and manufacturers are always going to have followers and haters. It is the nature of business. Whether it is Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Ford or Chevy (or our president-elect), there's always going to be some set of customers crusading for or against them for some issue real or imagined. I know of one case (not in the ebike field) where the very small company makes high quality products and has developed a strong following of customers, as well as the haters who think he charges too much, or disagree with his product claims, and that he is paying off people to make good reports, etc. In that case I know the situation well enough to see this is not true or even possible, there just isn't enough money for that to happen and the individual's code of ethics would not allow it anyway. But the haters are convinced.
In one case here on ES we have a hateful signature that contains many antagonistic claims against a vendor. One claim is that the vendor "lies" about the capacity of their packs. The math is pretty simple, it appears that the vendor took the manufacturer's cell capacity data and multiplied it by the number of parallel cells in the pack. The cell manufacturer provides several capacity values on the datasheet, and they picked the higher, more optimistic one. As an engineer I would tend to choose the lower "guaranteed" capacity which would yield a slightly lower number, or better yet - base it on extensive testing. Many vendors do exactly what vendor did, and continue to do so (in some cases they claim even more). The cell manufacturer's try to make cells that exceed their specs, so in actual measurements on packs, this vendor found the packs to meet the higher numbers, in testing involving small sample sizes. While these pack ratings were optimistic, I think it is extreme to refer to this as "lying", and there are dozens of other vendors routinely doing this so it is hardly unusual.
Customer interactions with a vendor occasionally go bad, and not all customers are completely honest. Occasionally some misrepresent the problem or intentionally hide the real root cause - like they dropped the product, or immersed in in salt water, and they want it fixed or replaced, or they claim it never arrived so they can effectively steal it. These interactions are rare, but they do occur. The situation is exacerbated for batteries since a damaged battery cannot be returned to the vendor, or the cost of returning a product is high enough to make the customer very unhappy and the vendor reluctant to pay. Vendors are also people, and they have their good and bad days. People also make mistakes, and learn from them, and hopefully improve. If they don't it will affect their business.
From what we have seen, the vendor has been improving. They have invested in more testing equipment and chosen more conservative numbers for their battery capacity. A battery from that vendor that I accidentally ran hard to flat met the capacity ratings. In general I try not to test that, it is not good for the pack.
Seeing what amounts to a never ending tirade in a signature that represents what is effectively an opinion about an event from a situation taken out of context seems inappropriate. These discussions should take place in a thread, not a one-sided broadcast in a sig. There are a few of them here on ES. There are many positive sigs, the negatives are few. But there is no way for a vendor to appropriately respond to the negatives in a sig. There's only the one person to be judge, and no jury. There's no context. I agree that we should have the discourse, just not in a sig. Perhaps the sig could contain a link to the thread. But the vendor and his customers must be allowed to respond, and isolated events should slide into history. The process should be the same for all vendors.
Thanks for the opportunity to discuss this, and the effort to make ES a better place.