On Wed, 21 Jun 2023 20:43:46 +0000 Andy Smith <a...@strugglers.net> wrote:
> Hello, > > On Wed, Jun 21, 2023 at 05:52:20PM +0200, to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > > On Wed, Jun 21, 2023 at 10:18:18AM -0400, David Peacock wrote: > > > I'm seeing a shocking and disappointing amount of disrespect and > > > vulgarity of late from several parties. If there is no active > > > moderation possible, it would be nice to see us moderate > > > ourselves into civility, lest this list degenerate into something > > > that embarrasses the entire Debian project. > > > > Since "shocking", "disrespect" and "vulgarity" are pretty subjective > > measures (they are still very legitimate, though), it would be nice > > and constructive if you gave people the chance to understand what > > you are taking issue with. > > I don't think that will actually be productive but if anyone is > going to do that I would strongly suggest they do so off-list with > the authors of the posts they take issue with. I think that calling > people out on-list is likely to devolve into a huge flame war. > > The reason why I don't think it will be productive is that posters > tend to feel they are justified in what they post, and people > who disagree with them are "just an opinion, man". What may go over > better is a gentle off-list comment by someone with actual authority > within Debian. A problem with that being that there isn't really any > authority to moderate on this mailing list by anyone, except for in > the most extreme of circumstances. > > Then again, I have had a DD take me to task off-list recently > telling me that me opening an email with "Hi," was passive > aggressive and that the rest of the content of my email was not > worth sending. Yet from my perspective the original poster and I had > had a reasonably productive thread on-list, so, you know, not all > persons of authority are cut out for this kind of thing either! I have to agree here. If someone starts psychoanalyzing me by way of correction, I'm switching off. "Passive-aggressive" is pure psychobabble. > > I think Debian's community team do a pretty good job when they do > actually get involved, I just wish they could get involved more. > For what it's worth, in the 90s I co-founded my local Linux Users Group. For about a decade, I was treasurer, president, list admin and moderator. I rarely had to ban someone from the list. I had similar list rules to Debian, and occasionally I stepped in to warn miscreants. But mostly, list members curtailed bad behavior. I believe they did this because this was *their* group and *their* list. And because they didn't want to see an otherwise reasonable contributor banned for having a bad day, or being easily antagonized by another idiot. The difference is that in my group, there were a total of 400, and many of them knew each other from meetings. I'm guessing DU has quite a few more. The more people, the harder it is to have a cohesive group. And there's no one here to ban them when they get out of hand (or is there?). Just my two cents worth. Paul -- Paul M. Foster Personal Blog: http://noferblatz.com Company Site: http://quillandmouse.com Software Projects: https://gitlab.com/paulmfoster
