On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 11:28 PM, R. David Murray <rdmurray@bitdance.com> wrote:
As an aside, it has occurred to me that the fundamental problem here is that we do not feel that Anatoly respects *us*. So it is no wonder that we are offended and do not respect him.
Agreed. Being a welcoming community means *defaulting* to respect and giving people the benefit of the doubt. We ultimately created core-mentorship + python-ideas + python-dev as separate lists to provide people with an on-ramp to involvement, and we gently redirect posters to more appropriate locations.
In the vast majority of cases, that gentle redirection has been completely sufficient - posters to the wrong list get the hint, switch to the correct list and (hopefully) receive more useful answers there.
The problem that has arisen is what to do with people like Anatoly that expect the core developers to abide by *their* wishes, rather than accept that the development team has already established norms that they need to follow. Leaving it up to individuals to place people on email auto-ignore lists is avoiding the problem rather than resolving it, and clearly doesn't work for other shared resources like the tracker and the wiki. While it feels easier to let things run like that, because nobody wants to be the bad guy and say "look, we know you're trying to help, but please, just stop", in the long term it's bad because of the toll it takes on the people that actually *are* helping.
However, I also agree with David that we'd like guidelines a little more objective than "congratulations, your behaviour has convinced almost all the core developers that have tried to deal with you extensively to start deleting your emails without reading them because you're almost certainly going to be wasting their time".
Regards, Nick.
-- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia