Can we perhaps have a separate flexcoders-scott-barnes list to discuss whether or not Scott Barnes should be allowed to post to flexcoders and to what extent? Every post by Scott generates three to five posts discussing whether or not his commentary/evangelism is welcome here--this is unarguably more off-topic noise than his actual contributions.
-Maciek -----Original Message----- From: Cole Joplin <cole_jop...@yahoo.com> Reply-to: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [flexcoders] Re: Ribbon in FLEX Date: Wed, 1 Apr 2009 14:41:10 -0700 (PDT) > More importantly, I have a concern. There is plenty of room in RIA and > Microsoft-oriented forums and groups to make their case. I'm even fine > with some open debate in Flexcoders. What I don't want to see is > Microsoft's Rich Platforms Product Manager, let alone other > Microsofties, spamming our Flex group with spin on thread after thread > after thread. Given the traffic on this list, I hardly think that the 2-3 on-topic posts I've seen from Scott in the past week classify as spam. -- Jeffry Houser, Technical Entrepreneur Jeffry, no fair editing out the next sentence: "More importantly, I have a concern. There is plenty of room in RIA and Microsoft-oriented forums and groups to make their case. I'm even fine with some open debate in Flexcoders. What I don't want to see is Microsoft's Rich Platforms Product Manager, let alone other Microsofties, spamming our Flex group with spin on thread after thread after thread. I'm not saying we are there, I'm saying I'm concerned about it. Just reading the language, the last couple of posts are certainly exploring that territory. I think there are more appropriate venues for that than Flexcoders." Being on-topic does not change the nature of the content. Take the third example. Looking over the body of threads of this group, I can't recall seeing a nice bullet-formatted explanation like the one offered by Scott of why IE does not want to support SVG. I'm not saying this was a copy-paste thing, but it is visually very different. Adobe, Microsoft, and others have plenty of propoganda (or spam) posts, and no one is arguing that point. But I'm not going to pretend this particular content is of the same casual nature of the posts typical members of this group make. Scott uses Microsoft's participation in standards bodies and knowledge of gui research that clearly expresses an authority posture to legitimize his point. The typical posts here are overtly subjective developer opinions taken with a grain of salt. Clearly not the same content. Secondly, this is not a response from a Flex developer, doing Flex stuff every work day. (...imagining Scott with a Flex sticker on his laptop as Steve Ballmer walks by...) This is a corporate-sounding explanation, from actual Microsoft management, on an Adobe Flex group, suggesting we use ribbons in Flex, ignore SVG and thank Microsoft for their h.264 standards compliance. Any part of that sentence not accurate? I'm sure Scott is not programming in Flex, and could not possibly be confused as a member of the Flex community or an objective observer. Therefore, his responses in this group must be viewed in the approriate context, in a truthful light. Clearly not a typical poster. If Flexcoders' threads become an active corporate information outlet for Adobe competitors, I don't think that's a good thing for the group. That is my point, and I think it's a perfectly legitimate one.
