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

[Nick Coghlan]

On 30 November 2013 06:12, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
>> If someone turns away from the community because we decided we didn't want
>> someone who is rude participating and ruining the experience for others then
>> I'm fine with losing that person's participation just like anyone who
>> chooses not to come to PyCon because we have a CoC (they can still use
>> Python, they can just choose to not participate in the community). But if we
>> lose a single individual because they didn't like someone being rude to them
>> or others then that is a loss I don't want to see. Once again, the
>> cost/benefit ratio of everyone as a group having to ignore a single
>> troublemaker does not seem like the best solution.
>
>
> Again, I haven't seen Anatoly interfere with others. I imagine that most
> people seeing his posts will recognize him as the nutcase he is.

Noah Kantrowitz and I recently had to warn him off harassing the PyPI
2 developers (Richard Jones and Donald Stufft).

Them I had to post on distutils-sig to explain why we were being so
abrupt, since many of the folks there hadn't had the "pleasure" of
experiencing Anatoly's antics before:
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/distutils-sig/2013-November/023051.html

The problem with someone like Anatoly isn't just that he's an energy
drain, it's the fact that the way we deal with him reflects our
knowledge of that fact, and then other people go "hang on, that's a
bit rude", because they don't know we've already been putting up with
him for years, and long ago ran out of patience for his antics.

I have him killfiled, Brett has him killfiled, most of the other core
developers already have him killfiled, but silently ignoring him isn't
a solution, since that has it's own damaging effects on the lists.

I've gone on record before in favour of banning him permanently:

    https://mail.python.org/pipermail//python-committers/2012-December/002287.html

And I just did so again today:

    https://mail.python.org/pipermail//python-dev/2013-November/130646.html

We have plenty of documented evidence of his antics to back us up if
anyone wants to make a big deal of it. At his point, it's a matter of
"we care about Anatoly more than we do about the people he is pissing
off", and that's taking inclusiveness to ridiculous extremes.

Every resource on OSS community management says the same thing: there
are some people where trying to continue to include them will do the
community more harm than good. Many people will leave of their own
accord if they're consistently ignored, but if they can't take the
hint, then we need to be more forceful in showing them the door.

This piece on Geek Social Fallacies is also relevant, since I think
we're falling into the "Ostracizers are Evil" trap in refusing to ban
Anatoly despite on ongoing pattern of detrimental behaviour that has
persisted over years:
http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia