It would be nice to have a law against being a jerk if we had some foolproof way to enforce it. But the definition of being a jerk varies, and it's utterly impr

It would be nice to have a law against being a jerk if we had some foolproof way to enforce it. But the definition of being a jerk varies, and it's utterly impractical. Therefore, society at large uses societal feedback to soft-punish people who misbehave: you can say whatever you want, but you will have to deal with how others react to your behavior. It's an imperfect system, but it's the best we have found. Github should be the same: step in when there are egregious issues where the law is broken (threats, stalking, subpoenas, hacking, etc), but otherwise let the individual development communities regulate themselves (like they did for the repo in the original comment). Sometimes you will agree with how something was handled; sometimes you will disagree with how something was handled. But it will be handled by the individuals it affects. An alternative available to GH might be to have an impartial entity available to provide objective input, if the community asks for it: "Ok GH community guideline arbitrator panel - this is what happened, with the primary documentation of the exchange being this pull request, this email exchange, and this glitter bomb which is photographed in the office where it went off. Please give us a 3rd-person opinion (by a group of people who often think about these issues and are deft in handling them effectively) since we are obviously emotional about it by virtue of our involvement. I'm just spitballing, but that would allow github to demonstrate their commitment to diversity without making rules that will be enforced subjectively and inconsistently.