Honestly I don't think anyone currently active in the Drupal community could be
framed as more curmedgeonly than myself, but if you want to fight for the title
it might be entertaining ;)
I think I could phrase "This isn't about you" better. It wasn't meant to target you-you,
but you as a developer. I was taking your personal story, applying it as what I imagine many
developers who made the same choice you did felt and saying, This isn't about developers vs.
non-developers, and I feel the question of "How do we make it a good place for developers to
work?" isn't the right question. No, I wasn't trying to personally invalidate the experience
you bring to the table, although I can see how specifically stating exactly that might have
confused people. I'll sit hear and chew on my foot a while.
I guess what I am ultimately saying, is we keep saying This *or* that. Would it be
helpful to take a little of our thought process and say, "what if?". I mean,
we have a goal here, right?
How do we make an infrastructure that supports newcomers, facilitates developers,
concentrates on non-disruptive integration of factions, and keeps our community
strong?" When I say 'you won't please everybody' I mean it, but I feel like
the current conversation is please A or please B, there is no C.
Throw both those models out, and lets figure out what we actually want.
-Sam
Sam Tresler
646-246-8403
On Fri, 18 Mar 2011, Earl Miles wrote:
On 3/18/2011 1:52 PM, Sam Tresler wrote:
Really, a way to translate what you're saying is that you'd rather *I*
didn't have a place where I can participate, because I don't want to be
inundated with support requests.
This isn't about you. That thinking is part of the problem, in my
opinion. We're having a conversation here about what is best for
Drupal, not what is best for the developers. I'm not trying to be
inflammatory, but making the project worse for the end users, the
documenters, the forum posters, and various other people who bring good
things to the table isn't a tenable solution.
Prior to #drupal-contribute being split out, we had a bot that would,
several times a day, 'correct' people about which channel they should be
asking support questions in. Sometimes these corrections were taken
amiss. No matter how politely we framed them, I always found these
corrections to be offensive.
One of the reasons I left #drupal was because I was tired of how
offensive that was.
What webchick wants is a place where everyone can gather and be happy.
But, like you just said, we can't please everyone.
If the choice is to please new people who may or may not contribute, who
may or may not stick around, at the expense of people who are
contributing and have stuck around, that is going to create churn.
I'm not in agreement with the camp that says our current system is
telling new users to go away. I think our OLD system was telling new
users to go away, by throwing them into an environment that they
fundamentally won't be ready for.
And I think it's wrong to insist that people who are on IRC to do work
have to stick around in an environment where they will have to watch a
bot tell new users to screw off (in nicer words...well, eventually. For
at least a year it was NOT nicer words) is fundamentally wrong and
counterproductive.
Naturally, I find it interesting that when I tried to write from my
experience and my example and how I use IRC, the responses are "This
isn't about you."
Why are you allowed to write about your experiences as being normal, yet
my experience makes me elitist and/or childish? Why is it you're
assuming that I'm only doing this to make my life easier, and screw the
newbies? Am I really that curmudgeonly?
So, making this about me: I just interpreted, "Get off IRC. It's for new
people." (Yes, that's tongue in cheek).
