On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 8:36 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan@gmail.com> wrote:
We don't want to be mean to somebody who genuinely appears to be trying to help, but eventually we have to look at his net impact and say "keeping our productive volunteers happy is more important than trying to include someone who has demonstrated over an extended period of time that they lack the ability to collaborate effectively". At the very least, that means revoking tracker and python-dev posting privileges. I'd vote for cutting him off from python-ideas, too.
Something I've realised may not be obvious to everyone - the problem isn't low SNR per se (if you dig up some of my early postings to python-list and python-dev, you'll find a *lot* of noise, so me chastising new posters for low SNR would be the height of hypocrisy), as the fact that Anatoly's SNR hasn't improved over the years, despite core devs (and others) putting plenty of effort into trying to help him learn. The breaking point for me was when he recently declared that he was completely unrepentant about the fact that he repeatedly wastes other people's time by failing to do his research [1]:
"""It's too boring to live in a world of existing knowledge and expertise, and yes, I am not aware of any open collaboration stuff expertise. Any reading recommendations with concentrated knowledge that can fit my brain?"""
FFS, it's the internet. Search engines exist. I, for one, am done spoon feeding him answers that are off topic for the core Python lists, and that he should be able to answer on his own (although I'll still reply to other people that reply to him).
If we start with a suspension rather than a ban, that would also be fine by me. As others have noted, we've given *one* tracker suspension that I'm aware of and it seemed to work wonders.
Regards, Nick.
[1] http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2012-June/015304.html
-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia