Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
Perhaps if the proctors had discussed things first, they wouldn't have made two major screwups that resulted in Gentoo losing yet another developer.
Might I suggest that anybody who is waiting for "one last straw" go ahead and take a month or two off right now and save everybody the drama? If I felt like I was in a position on a project where I was so fed-up that if anything serious happened I'd just quit, and I wasn't being paid at all, I'd take a vacation. Relax! Come back with an idea of why it is I'm participating in the project in the first place. It would be better for myself and the project than doing something that will upset a lot of people and which I might regret down the road. It might be harder in the "real world" if you need a steady income, but most of us at Gentoo have the liberty of taking time off without much of a drop in income... :)
If the proctors overstepped their bounds I'm sure the council will talk to them about it in the appropriate forum, and straighten things out. Some general positive contribution as to what role if any proctors should have is also a good thing. I've really only seen two roles advocated in this series of posts:
1. They're essentially doing the right thing already - short-term bans are OK to enforce cooldown periods and stop off-topic flames.
2. They really aren't needed at all.The few posts that don't fall into those categories haven't really suggested anything else in-between as an alternative. Personally I tend to fall into category #1 - maybe with the addition of sending private warnings before enforcing bans. A better solution might be closing threads, but this probably isn't all that practical to accomplish in a mailing list without moderating the list with approval of all posts.
If somebody has a practical suggestion as to how the proctors can fulfill their mission without causing problems, I'm sure they're open to it. I'm not sure I'd call the CoC a failure so much as a work in progress - it may already be causing an improvement in bugzilla or elsewhere even if not obviously on this list. In any case, there really isn't anything in the CoC that isn't generally good-policy, so just having it acts as a warning to those who might later need to be dealt with simply for being super-obnoxious.
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