> Postings in a closed online forum of sexual nature affects standing in an online collaboration community working on software. Okay. Under my real name/identi

> Postings in a closed online forum of sexual nature affects standing in an online collaboration community working on software. Okay. Under my real name/identity, I was once upon a time a substantial contributor to the Drupal project, a PHP-based CMS/web dev framework. Earlier this year, we had a kerfluffle where someone had a grudge against Larry "Crell" Garfield, a core developer, liaison to the wider PHP community, and just general pillar of the Drupal community for over a decade. This person shared activity that Crell had done in the "Gor" (kinda BSDM plus fantasy cosplay) community, which, IIRC, included private forum posts, a dating site profile, and a slideshow deck he had presented from a convention. All of this stuff was from private web sites; eg, ones where you'd have to at least sign up for an account to get access to. The person with the grudge, who, as far as I know, has yet to be identified, provided this material to the Drupal Association as evidence that Crell, a typical SV leftist in most respects, was actually a closeted unrepentant misogynist who needed to be kicked out of the community. Battle lines were drawn, with some agreeing that he was trash while others felt that his out-of-community behavior had no effect on all the hard work he had done and could still do within it. And bickering happened instead of collaboration and coding. Ultimately the Association came down on the side of the agitators and disinvited Crell from his speaking position at the next Drupalcon, where he had always been prevalent. Expectedly, he became quite bitter about this and has somewhat voluntarily withdrawn further from the community. So now a talented developer and decade-plus community member has been effectively kicked out of the community for personal, private kinks he, by all accounts, took great care to keep private and separate from this community. Due to this and other reasons, I now use pseudonyms when joining new communities, and now some of my best OSS work is being done under a pseudonym I have taken care to keep air-gapped from my real identity - not great for my career, but I know that I, as a human, have quirks and kinks as well that others would just love to judge me by, and it's apparently what we have to do nowadays in order to be judged by our work rather than our pasts and out-of-community activity. And, frankly, I'm so disgusted by what happened to Crell that I too have disengaged from the community and no longer use Drupal as my framework of choice (though there are other reasons as well for the latter). So, no. Postings in a closed online forum of sexual nature only affects standing in an online collaboration community working on software if you make it so. Crell's first post about the incident: https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-outing https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-outing - see others on his blog for more.