On Dec 16, 2005, at 6:28 PM, Jean T. Anderson wrote:
For crying out loud, would you please supply links to the exact posts
you consider to be in poor taste and the person's name? I just
wasted
10 minutes trying to follow the bread crumbs. You have to make it
easier on reviewers -- everyone seems to be painfully avoiding
a pointer to an actual message.
sorry -- I'm not trying to frustrate folks. I considered posting
specific links, but withdrew them at the end, even though they are
links to public archives. The name at the core is Michael Segel.
Below are links to public responses to some of his posts (which are
numerous enough that they alone would be frustrating to wade through):
Well, yes, but what I asked for was the posts that you consider to be
in poor taste, not responses to those posts. But now that I know who
you are talking about I could use the view-by-author and see that this
person is better than the typical troll with diarrhea of the fingers.
He is usually right, even when though he would fail miserably as a
strategist, and most of his posts in October were both useful
and normal. In others, he slides into troll mode on responses.
The answer is to ask your community not to feed the troll when it
gets grumpy and just ignore him, and to limit discussion to the
topic of the list. Yes, he is an annoying troll, but on balance
he hasn't done anything truly disruptive or offensive that I could find.
Personally, if I had been on the list when he started inventing big
words about GPL and IBM, I would have flamed him to a crisp so badly
that he would have unsubscribed (and I probably would have been
banned outright). Your calls for politeness will only restrain those
who care.
The last two were recent (this week). Off line communication makes
me believe he has no intention of moderating his behavior, hence
the question of at what point you unsubscribe/deny a user.
When his presence is worse than his absence, you can deny him, but
it is better to ask everyone in the community to simply shun him.
He doesn't start off in troll mode.
One of the DB PMC members was asking about frequency of denial,
which is an excellent question, which Noel responded to with
"Rarely. Really really rarely." It's helpful for us to know how
other projects at the ASF handle such situations. I'm getting
questions from users asking why we don't just boot him. I'm happy
to respond with "The ASF doesn't like to do that except for the
most extreme cases" if that is the right answer. This case is
merely very annoying, not extreme.
I think ignoring is an excellent tactic for a developer's list. I
worry that isn't strong enough for a user's list, but I also
wouldn't want to embark on a path that could backfire.
Then feel free to delete the users list. I am serious.
....Roy
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