[python-committers] Anatoly has been warned about his behaviour potentially leading to his loss of tracker privileges

[Ned Deily]

On Nov 29, 2013, at 13:51 , Antoine Pitrou <antoine at python.org> wrote:

> On ven., 2013-11-29 at 13:16 -0800, Ned Deily wrote:
>> Right.  We can't change other people's behavior.  We can at best
>> encourage change.  In this case, I'm doubtful that banning would serve
>> as an encouragement.
> 
> Personally, I don't see it as an encouragement, rather a solution.
> The "temporary" part is in case he actually wants to start behaving
> better, but I'm not holding my breath.
> 
> You can't fix people, but you can prevent them from actually being
> harmful.

The thing is it's a technical solution to a social problem.  I don't the former tend to be all that effective for the latter.  And I think reasonable people can disagree about the degree of harmfulness.  I personally don't see his behavior, in and of itself, as all that harmful.  I *do* see the negative reaction it provokes as being harmful.  Clearly, it bothers people and that is disruptive.  But it would be a whole lot less disruptive if we didn't let it be, e.g. by just letting it go and ignoring it.

I'm very sympathetic to Alex's argument earlier and the link he provided to Karl Fogel's book.  I think the case study provided there from the svn project is not all that comparable to the situation here.  It's not the case that the mailing list(s) here is/are being swamped by one disruptive person.  If we all just agreed to ignore him and try not to feel compelled to respond, I believe we would soon find there is no longer an issue and we wouldn't need to be discussing potentially damaging solutions like formally banning.

>> Why is it that we find him so annoying, enough to advocate fairly
>> drastic measures like banning?  There have been and will be others who
>> behave similarly.
> I've only been here since 2006 or so, but I can't remember someone
> behaving like that on such a frequent and long-lived basis. He does
> stand out.

I think he stands out in part because we've spotlighted him.

>> Comparing his behavior to some of the recent, on-going cases of wildly
>> inappropriate behavior on python-list (not involving Anatoly),
> 
> If python-list is a troll magnet, that's a pity, but how is that
> relevant to the *development community*?

It's relevant because python-list is yet another forum hosted by the PSF via python.org mailing lists and is viewed as part of the broader Python community as a whole.  If we propose to ban someone from python-list, along with other lists, that raises the question of what standards are being used.  There is, in fact, a published suggested CoC for python-list (http://www.python.org/community/lists/).  In the help vampire case, I think most reasonable people would agree that the CoC is reasonable, was clearly being violated, and that banning was a drastic, but ultimately, necessary step as people were not willing to just ignore the misbehavior.  If the same CoC were applied to python-dev (and python-ideas et al), I think many people would disagree that the behavior in this case violates a similar CoC seriously enough to warrant a ban.
   
> Have you noticed that many of us hardly ever participate in
> python-list? 
> I personally hate reading python-list because so much of it is misguided
> wishful-thinking people trying to help and reason trolls, and making
> python-list a frankly annoying place :-(

It is a problem.  And choosing to not participate is a perfectly rational and legitimate response.  But it doesn't necessarily follow that banning someone is a better response.  Trying to encourage different behavior can help if someone wants to take on that generally thankless effort.  I applaud people like the other Ned who has lately been trying to do so there with some success.  But it's not for everyone.

--
  Ned Deily
  nad at acm.org -- []