There are hard-forks, forks, and blockchain rollbacks (essentially, large blockchain re-organizations).
Hard-forks are performed because there is a bug in the software that needs fixing - a fault in the software itself.
Bitcoin has had a few emergency hard-forks; 2 to be exact. These are positive changes - they show that the developers and community are on top of things, and capable of fixing the protocol or protocol implementation when necessary.
Forks are when there are two competing blockchains - this is usually a bad thing. Simple forks are often caused when there are protocol version conflicts, and the longer chain stops getting accepted by a set of nodes, who then branch into their own chain. Forks are almost always a bad thing.
Blockchain rollbacks and re-orgs happen when someone 51% attacks the network, or for the first time with VRC, when devs decide to force a revert to a previous checkpoint. Blockchain re-organizations (rollbacks) are VERY BAD. They show that the network has NO orphan security, and that you very simply should not trust your money on that blockchain.
A fork is not a fork. Anyone that says that has no idea what they are talking about, and you probably shouldn't believe anything else they claim to know.
Nothing I'm saying is untrue, nor attacking a specific coin. I would make these statements about any blockchain that was re-organized like VRC was.
It's not FUD if it's true - it's sharing knowledge.
FUD has become the most ridiculously overused buzz word in this thread. And it's being used to discredit people who's points cannot otherwise be disproven. So, please, keep shouting FUD at me... it's obvious you're the only one spreading bullshit when you do so.
After reading your explanation of the fork vs hard fork vs block chain roll back, I recalled the early days of vericoin.
In the first day of mining, at around 1500 blocks, there was a fork (pow stage of vericoin was a fork heaven), the developer used a hard fork to hardfork the block chain to a early block before the fork happens.
I lost about somewhere between 10000 and 12000 coins in that hard fork (I was in the hero pool, the long and main block chain, and the 0feepool was on shorter chain, and in the first day, diff was very very low). At that time, I didn't think much about the hard fork (or we can now call it a rollback). After reading this explanation, that hard fork is just a mistake and should never be done. What the developers should have done is to find the long block chain, and use that right block chain to ask miners go to miner on that chain, rather than rolling it back.
Those forks happened multiple times and i remember it was rolled back multiple times. I was always mining in the hero pool and also lost some coins during those rollbacks.
Now I think it back, the rollback after mintpal hack is not alone(it has been done multiple times before), it has shown the incompetence of the developers, looks like they don't know what they were doing and just do what they want to do, rather than following the right thing in the community.
I don't want to FUD, but I am trying to say the fact. You guys can look at my post history and tell.