On 2009-10-30 07:30 AM, Aaron Watters wrote:
Let me vent my annoyance.
In the last couple months on a few occasions
I've tried various Python libraries (and I'm not going to
name names) and run into some problem.
Following the documented procedure I eventually
post the problem to the "support" list trying to politely
explain everything, including the admission that
it may all be my stupidity causing the problem.
Then I'm told automatically that my post will
be moderated.
Then nothing happens. The post just disappears.
No offline reply. Nothing.
I don't know why this happens, but if people
are using their "support" forums as propaganda
lists for only happy news I consider this a serious
violation of the spirit of open source. There
is nothing wrong with filtering spam, of course,
but silently filtering non-spam, even inane non-spam,
is not acceptable. At least there should be an
offline RTFM reply to the poster.
You almost certainly ran into technical misconfiguration or lazy moderators.
Both are distressingly common with mailing lists. Hanlon's Razor: "Never
attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." You
may also want to check to see if your mail host is on any spam block lists like
Spamhaus.
So go ahead and name names. This may be the one chance the list owners will be
able to learn about their misconfiguration. Just don't accuse them of censoring
negative posts without actual evidence; you don't have any to support that
conclusion.
In any case, it is accepted (or so I assert) that if you are having problems
with a Python project, you can post your questions here until you are able to
post to the project's mailing list.
--
Robert Kern
"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
an underlying truth."
-- Umberto Eco
--
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