On Monday 31 January 2005 16:16, Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> wrote: > >>1) - a community where people are pleasant to each other, where > >>disagreements are discussed politely, and where people who are unable to > >>be civil are not glorified for their behaviour. > > > > This isn't too far from the situation we have. > > Really? A moment ago you were saying that flaming a polite, competent > coder was a respectable way to become famous.
Flaming competent coders can be a quick way to become infamous. Read my messages again and you will discover that I did not say that flaming good coders makes anyone famous, just that good coders can generally ignore the idiots. > In any case, mere civility is a woefully low bar to set. Is there really > some reason Debian shouldn't be an absolute pleasure to be involved in, > ubiquitously and continually? Perhaps we can't hope to never receive > nasty comments from outsiders, but is there any particular reason we > can't make our development forums technical, productive, kind, and > generous? While we have an open posting policy for the Debian lists with no moderation it is impossible to have "kind and generous" lists. Make all posting by non-subscribers moderated (and all postings to this list by non-DDs moderated) and have a set of rules for posting that are enforced and there might be an improvement. With such a system the post that started this thread would not have gone to the list and would instead have received a message from a moderator explaining why it's a bad message to send to the list. However such changes are extremely unlikely to happen. But even enforcing rules about posting won't necessarily make the lists "kind and generous". Some lists and forums that I have read which have such behavior rules are filled with posts that try to get as close as possible to the line without crossing it. However to get the result that one flame might get they use a series of more subtle attacks carried out over a period of weeks or months. The end result is often a cold-war in the list which can over the period of years end in a split in the community. One list that I am on has had two such splits over the course of a few years due to on-going subtle attacks which didn't quite break the rules. Two forums that I have lurked on have had cold wars that greatly exceed the scope of anything that happens on the Debian lists (they ended up having PCs hacked, lawyers called in, and lots of other nasty stuff). Finally even if you prevent flame wars and cold wars in the community that doesn't mean that things will always be working well. In some communities there are no flames so people who offend others just get ostracised. The problem with that is that every time you are late replying to an email the other person might think that you hate them. It's really annoying when someone thinks that I have a grudge against them just because their email is in my queue of 5000 messages that need to be read. PS I've been in discussion with the originator of this thread off-list. He seems OK now that he's calmed down, and doesn't seem likely to lose it again in that manner. He'll probably end up becoming a DD if given a chance. Things seemed to work out OK in this instance. -- http://www.coker.com.au/selinux/ My NSA Security Enhanced Linux packages http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
