13 ms·

Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports

76 points by AndrewDucker 15y ago

Stythys 15y ago
good.
jerrya 15y ago
Richard Mlynarik is a hacker with a deservedly excellent reputation. And sometimes he has a sharp tongue which in context can be both enjoyable and terrifying. But here's the important part for entrepreneurs: what percentage of users of mozilla products or any product bother to submit bug reports? What Richard is doing here is investing his time into making Mozilla better. I am always amazed at the projects and companies that hold their users in contempt and get upset when bug reports or forum messages express a user's frustration. What they should be doing is sincerely expressing their thanks that the user would give them any message at all, and not just switch to a competitor, or just badmouth them to their friends. I see nothing in this bug report that deserves banning, and it is certainly Mozilla's loss and their user's loss that they would ban Mlynarik instead of listening to him. And to make matters worse, he's absolutely correct here too.
- MrUnknown 15y ago
  He was being a complete idiot in his bug report. The moderator stated that he has been warned many times before. He completely deserved to be banned after being warned that his actions will result in being banned. Sure, he is submitting bug reports, but his childish behavior shouldn't have to be tolerated because of this.
  - vijaydev 15y ago
    We don't know the earlier instances where he was warned. IMHO, this particular bug report doesn't seem to be out of line with the rules here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html
    - asadotzler 15y ago
      But you could look if you wanted to. How about when he called Thunderbird developers simians and said he wanted to cut off their hands so they couldn't program any more? Is that out of line enough for you? What about saying "screw you" and calling developers children. I consider all of that out of line. He was being a bully and he got banned for it. Good on Dan Mosedale. Bullies suck and we shouldn't let them pollute our communities with their abuse.
      - vijaydev 15y ago
        Yes, I saw one in a link posted above. Definitely out of line. No second thoughts on that. If the ban had happened in reply to one such post, it would have been unquestioned by many.
        asadotzler 15y ago
        Yeah, unfortunately for everyone he was only warned on the worst of the interactions and given a second chance. Sometimes a ban on the first offense is better. Still, a ban after a failure to heed a warning seems completely reasonable. Heck, a re-evaluation of the original interaction with the knowledge of how he behaved after the warning would have worked too. But again, the important thing isn't where the ban happened, it's that the project rejected a bully.
        chittis 15y ago
        The important thing is exactly when and why the ban happened. As others have pointed out, his latest bug report that got him banned was hugely better than his older bug report filled with personal insults that got him a warning. This shows that he took the warning seriously enough to stop the personal attacks. Banning him now makes me think the developers of Thunderbird are ego maniacs.
  - gojomo 15y ago
    If this report is representative, I don't think a thousand similar reports would deserve a ban. There's some exasperation, some sarcasm, some foot-stomping while expressing strong opinions. But there's no profanity or insults. The strongest negative word used is 'stupid', and it's applied to a question in the UI, not any person. The details and rationale for considering the software's behavior an interaction faux pas are strong. It's hard to even see which part of 'Bugzilla Etiquette' this report violates: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html If other reports are worse, that's another matter. But if so, it seems odd this relatively mild report would be the final trigger that brings down the banhammer. (If there's a reliable pattern of abuse, just wait for the next non-mild incident.)
    - sid0 15y ago
      No, if there's a track record of obscene bug reports, then the person involved shouldn't be given even the slightest bit of slack. edit: if I were dmose, I'd have banned him a year ago for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372#c2 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372#c2.
      - gojomo 15y ago
        If they need to punish obscene reports, punish for those, specifically. When they happen. Don't punish a mild, non-obscene report some other time. edit for your edit: Thanks for finding an earlier clearer example. That comment was unnecessarily personal and abusive. It deserved reprimand or censure. And if the reprimand(s) are responsible for the less-personal tone of the 2011-06-30 comment, compared to the 2010-07-21 comment, they're working to increase the signal-to-emotional-noise ratio. But the controversy of a hard ban for a lesser transgression now introduces new emotional noise.
        sid0 15y ago
        While we might disagree on the exact mechanics, I think we can agree that any open-source community would be better without such people.
- bdfh42 15y ago
  Correct - it was a great bug report. Without the expression of frustration then the nature of the bug would not have been clear. Reports like this from my customers would be brilliant.
  - asadotzler 15y ago
    Would you like your customers saying "screw you" and "I want to cut off your hands so you can't program any more"? I wouldn't.
    - Deestan 15y ago
      Of course not, but the one time they are acceptably civil isn't the time to bring out the ban hammer.
      - asadotzler 15y ago
        When they continue to be abusive after a warning it doesn't really matter where mechanically the actual trigger was pulled. It was the right call. It was a late call, in my opinion. I'd have banned him at the "cut off his hands" comment with no warning and now recourse. But again, late or not, it was the right call. No project should have to tolerate bullies. They are toxic to the project and they should be excised as soon as possible.
    - soulinafishbowl 15y ago
      Absolutely! His was the pefect bug report. A chef cooks for his patrons, and a performer pleases his audience, just as a programmer codes for the user. With his report you have a passionately described, no holds barred look into what you are causing the user to feel when using the software. Don't let it hurt your feelings, just take it on the chin and recognize that in trying to make something better, you have inadvertently forgotten the primary objective: user experience. Oftentimes bug reports like this may just be a rant without relevant technical details, but the wonderful thing about this report, is that he gives you the best of both worlds: You have extremely insightful user experience along with the relevant technical details on how to address the issue. Be grateful, and wish more reports exactly like this.
- ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
  It took Mozilla 10 years to get Sunbird to version 1.0, not to mention how long it took them to iron out Thunderbird's "imperfections". As for FireFox, if it weren't for the extensions and the "open source" sticker no one would care about FireFox. They need all the Richard Mlynariks they can get. And I am..er... WAS a hard core FireFox user (switched to chrome a year ago) and still am a heavy Thunderbird user. Mozilla needs to haul ass.
  - gjm11 15y ago
    > They need all the Richard Mlynariks they can get. Only if each Richard Mlynarik they have increases the quality of the product. Do you have any reason to think it does? This particular Richard Mlynarik wasn't writing code for Firefox or Thunderbird (which is too bad because i hear he's an excellent hacker). He was submitting bug reports, most of them allegedly duplicates, full of inflammatory language. If you believe that bug reports filled with inflammatory language make a project work better than bug reports without it, then do please present your evidence for that. My own guess is that being rude to people may be effective in getting them to pay attention in the short term to your needs or wants rather than someone else's, but that it doesn't do anything to improve their overall productivity and may well make it worse by reducing their motivation.
    - ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
      I've had complete strangers on the the street tell me to my face that I was ugly. That's life. Oh well. Rude-ass Bug reports are better than no bug reports. Emotion 101: When people are pissed they curse. I agree with you, it would be beneficial for them not to but they do. I have a feeling a lot of the people who don't tolerate his language have never worked in customer service or with the public. Emotion happens, a LOT, learn to ignore it. Don't want to deal with it? Write a greasemonkey script that changes all the language you don't like into encouraging statements. All the programmers I know are very logical, stable people and it seems as a whole they're not used to erratic emotional behavior that people in customer service are used to seeing.
- shii 15y ago
  Richard Mlynarik is one of the developers for XEmacs and has contributed to coreutils in GNU. open up your terminal and type in man whoami.
  - asadotzler 15y ago
    And that gives him the right to be a bully? To say he'd like to cut off a Thunderbird developers hands so he can't program any more? To call developers simians? Nothing gives anyone the right to come into Mozilla's Bugzilla and behave like that.
    - rothron 15y ago
      Simians include all old world monkeys and apes, including humans. While you might interpret it as being an insult, and it may have been meant as such, it is factually correct.
- maranas 15y ago
  Agreed. Any bug report from a user is valuable - the fact that he was frustrated enough to report it means that there is a problem that needs to be addressed.
  - asadotzler 15y ago
    That's not strictly true. If you've already got a report of the issue from other more helpful users, then someone coming in and calling you names and threatening to physically harm you, that isn't necessarily adding value. We're very fortunate at Mozilla to have tens of thousands of but reporters who aren't bullies and who don't think because they wrote some GNU code once that they can threaten you and deride you. This means that the cost of kicking out the bullies is either trivial, or a net win.
  - nirvdrum 15y ago
    Almost everyone files a bug report in frustration because you're filing an issue about something that doesn't work the way you think it should. But most people are considerably more civil about it. I really don't like to play the "free" card. Too often developers say "well, it's open source so fix it or stop complaining." I don't think that's right at all . . . especially if you've advocated people use your software. However, having been involved with a lot of OSS projects, I can say that the bugs that get fixed the fastest are the ones that affect the developers themselves. Anything that gets fixed above and beyond that is a developer being a nice person in volunteering his time to help someone else. More to the point: it's hard to get people to work for free when they're demoralized and bug reports like this are demoralizing. If I were involved with the project, he's about the absolute last person I'd try to please no matter how right he may be. So, while I'm neutral on the ban, the bug reporter has to realize this is a very ineffective way to win friends and get his issues resolved.
- asadotzler 15y ago
  I am amazed at projects that allow toxic people to disrupt and mistreat other project members. I'm amazed when people defend bullies because they've got some kind of oldschool hacker credibility. Not having to listen to "a hacker with a deservedly excellent reputation" say he'd like to cut off your hands so you can't code any more is absolutely not a loss to the project. It's a proper and right kind of excision to remove toxic bullies like that no matter how correct was the substance of their report. (And as it turns out, the overwhelming majority of his reports were duplicates of existing reports, so it's not even a loss of the actual bug reports, just the nasty name calling and abusive and threatening behavior. I call that a win for the project.)
  - jerrya 15y ago
    " I'm amazed when people defend bullies because they've got some kind of oldschool hacker credibility." I actually said nothing like this, did I? What I actually said, a) he's has a reputation as a very smart individual, and for good reason, and b) his bug report specifically was not bullying at all, but was precise, accurate, and passionate. For what it's worth though, I don't find his calling a developer to be a simian to be offensive, I find it funny. I don't find his imagery of reaching through a monitor to cut off the fingers of someone to be offensive, or threatening, I find it amusing, and illustrative of his frustration at being ignored once more. I find your behavior in this forum, of repeatedly bringing up these lame examples of why he should be banned to be offensive. And more offensive in light of how you have not explained who you are. But the truth is, I use Chrome. And when I need an alternative browser, I turn to Opera or IE. I rarely use Firefox products anymore, because they are horrible. And I understand why they are horrible, it's because you guys are off in your own world and have no time or need to actually listen to your users, us guys that have been telling you for years of your bloat and your feature creep and your memory problems, and all the other crap you've tossed in there.
    - nsomaru 15y ago
      There is a decided difference between emotion and reason. Frustration is an expression of emotion and has no place in a bug report. A bug report should factually describe a problem and the steps a dev can take to reproduce them. Your frustration is a symptom of your own unmet expectations. The problem with _any_ expectation is that (being constant) it is bound to be unmet, eventually, given that the world is in a state of continuous change. So you can either lose your cool, or understand that this is the nature of the world, adapt and move on. The title of this post has "click bait" plastered all over it, and that single post takes the whole thing out of context. I'm sorry I fell for it. Google _all_ his bug reports and understand in the context.
- Confusion 15y ago
  What Richard is doing here is investing his time into making Mozilla better. Unfortunately, no matter how awesome he is for investing his time and no matter how useful his bug reports are, his bug reports are also so offensive, unconstructive and discouraging that it's deemed better for the community to ban him. I can understand and support that decision, although I may have chosen otherwise.
- grandinj 15y ago
  No, if he was really "investing his time", he'd be producing good, well-written bug reports, and, since he's such an awesome hacker, writing patches. Instead, he vents his frustrations on bugzilla and generally acts like an ass.
- kahawe 15y ago
  So because allegedly he is some "rock star", he should be allowed to violate their etiquette repeatedly?
wladimir 15y ago
Good. When filing bug reports you should try to work with the team and be as helpful as possible in solving the issue. Being a dick does not help anyone.
- vijaydev 15y ago
  Expressing frustrations is not being a dick.
  - MrUnknown 15y ago
    Expressing frustrations in a completely smart ass way is being a dick.
    - Kapelson 15y ago
      Regardless of whether he was being a dick or not, the issue is still there. A helpful dick is still valuable, and banning him is really only hurting the project as a whole.
      - sid0 15y ago
        Not if the negative vibe driving volunteers who might actually fix bugs away outweighs the help provided.
      - MrUnknown 15y ago
        Most people don't tend to respond well to these types of complaints. I used to work as customer service for a website and would constantly get sarcastic help requests. It made me hate them and I certainly didn't want to help them. In fact, I either ignored the ticket or just responded slowly as I handled tickets with more reasonable people. The people saying this is a "great" ticket and wish more reports were given this way are full of it. You will very quickly get tired of it because you realize you are doing everything you can to help them and they really don't care enough to give you enough respect to speak with you as a human being in a conversation. Instead choosing to be sarcastic and insult your efforts to help. I see this the other way around. I am thankful a huge bunch of volunteers spend many hours of their day creating software I use daily without having to pay for it. They don't deserve to be treated like this.
BasDirks 15y ago
How on earth does that deserve a ban? Mozilla would hate to have Linus Torvalds as a contributor.
- masklinn 15y ago
  > How on earth does that deserve a ban? That does not deserve a ban in and of itself. Repeated instances of that following warnings of unacceptable behavior, on the other hand, does. It would seem Richard here was in the second situation: > You've been warned repeatedly about the Bugzilla Etiquette rules, and you're still failing to respect them.
  - BasDirks 15y ago
    The "offender" could/should be more polite, but enforcing etiquette mustn't stifle progress. I don't mind the downvotes, but could you add why you disagree?
    - Robin_Message 15y ago
      Commenting about why you should be downvoted might stifle progress (of your karma downwards.)
      - BasDirks 15y ago
        I'm here for discussion, not karma.
  - felipemnoa 15y ago
    Linus has no qualms of telling someone he is full of BS: http://pardel.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/90/ http://pardel.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/90/
    - masklinn 15y ago
      Which really is irrelevant to the subject at hand.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
asadotzler 15y ago
It's my opinion that when you call a Thunderbird developer "some simian" and when you tell them to "Die die die die" and "Seriously, screw you" and you say things like "You know, every time I see a comment from [a specific Thunderbird developer] I just want to reach out through the intertubes and cut off his damned fingers to prevent him ever writing any code..." and when you're warned in a very civil tone with a clear explanation of why your approach is hurting rather than helping https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372#c3 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372#c3 and you still come back with more of that same approach, I think being banned from Bugzilla is a perfectly reasonable thing.
- shii 15y ago
  You're right, he is being a little abrasive there, but I'd take it in stride and enjoy; this sort of thing is normal on the Internet. And besides, he's right. Why did they replace cmd-f like that?
  - adw 15y ago
    Why should we accept unnecessarily abrasive behaviour as acceptable anywhere?
    - shii 15y ago
      Because sometimes actually helpful bug reports come packaged with snarky people. I see little problem with that. There's guys like zedshaw who always flame and get flamed, yet still provide lots of value. Plus it livens things up a bit. Nothing wrong with a little sarcastic banter here and there. Some people have their panties in a tight knot sometimes over some silly things. Not everything has to be so srs bznss all the time folks. From this banning, Mozilla has just lost a useful bug reporter and one of the founding fathers of GNU.
      - asadotzler 15y ago
        Being a founding father of GNU does not give you the right to be a bully. Telling a developer that you want to cut off his hands so he can't program is not helpful and people who behave like that are not useful bug reporters. They are bullies and they are toxic to an open source project. No project should tolerate personal attacks like that.
keyle 15y ago
I'd call this "how not to deal with customer feedbacks". If it were paying customers, they'd have none left with this attitude!
- ww520 15y ago
  Sure you can take abuse when you are paid, except they are doing it for free and deserve better treatment.
  - wccrawford 15y ago
    Except that most companies don't. Abusive customers are bad for the whole company and the other customers. They lower morale, raise costs, and are generally not worth the money they bring in. So if a company wouldn't do it for money, why would someone take that abuse for free? They wouldn't. And they didn't.
- asadotzler 15y ago
  You would accept one of your 100,000 paying customers who comes into your workplace shouting "die die die" and telling you he'd like to cut off your fingers so you can't work any more? After telling him that wasn't appropriate when he came back days or weeks later calling you a simian and shouting at you, you'd deal with it how? By inviting him into your office? I doubt it. I suspect you'd kick him out or call the cops to haul him off.
arihant 15y ago
If someone writes that kind of bug report for code that I write, the first thing I would do is take my shoe and beat myself to death. The man being frustrated is your fault. High chances there are million others who feel the same, at least he is conveying it to you. You're shooting the messenger here. If your critics give up on you and stop telling you how much you suck and how much they hate you, that's a very bad place to be in.
- asadotzler 15y ago
  If your critic is a bully and he comes into your workplace saying he'd like to physically maim you so you can't work any more and calls you names and think it's OK because he was, (in his own words, while he's verbally abusing you) "the second person after Stallman to ever write any GNU code" then I think you'd call him a bully, treat his attempts at participation as toxic, and kick him out of your workplace. You might even call the cops. Actually, you would call the cops. And you'd be right to.
  - arihant 15y ago
    Sure I will. But if he writes me a letter letting me know that I suck and that I should rather die than writing buggy code making millions of lives miserable everyday, I'd be fine. He didn't throw stones at Mozilla labs, he filed and commented on a bug report. Its just text, not a man in their office. Virtual != Real. Its a mind over matter issue. And as Twain would agree..if you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
    - asadotzler 15y ago
      I'm arguing that it's just as toxic in a bug report as in the real world (maybe even worse considering it's not ephemeral in a bug report and many more people are likely to be exposed to it.) And I'm arguing that what's reasonable in the physical world, kicking people out who are abusive, is reasonable in our online meeting places like Bugzilla. I may not personally mind, but I'm not easily bullied. I've got a pretty thick skin too. But that should not be a requirement for participating in our project.
    - 15y ago
hollerith 15y ago
Reminds me of Eric Naggum on comp.lang.lisp in the late 1990s. Although I have no memories of Eric's ever threatening anyone with violence, he wrote hundreds of very long very angry harangues, most containing insults and ad-hominems -- and (unlike Richard Mlynarik) he seemed to believe deep down that his debating opponents wanted to harm him. As in the present case, people argued that for Eric to continue his abuse would harm Lisp by driving away contributors and adoptees. Difference is that it was very difficult to ban someone from a newsgroup, and Eric never was.
- xyzzyz 15y ago
  Yeah, they were really strong and aggresive, and I really would people not to be like this, but at least I do not recall him attacking anyone else first. When the issue at hand was purely technical, he was really civil and really to the point.
kermitthehermit 15y ago
Mozilla is trying to be like Google with Thunderbird and Firefox, but they are failing. This guy who's getting / who got banned deserved it, but the changes they keep making aren't all that good. Firefox is eating a lot of memory, Thunderbird does odd things at times. A friend has 500 corporate workstations which are running Firefox 3.6.x and Thunderbird 3.1.x. Will he upgrade them to the newer versions, in which they keep pouring poorly tested code? No, he will switch to something else.
rickmb 15y ago
Although Mozilla would be quite right to ban someone if this kind of behavior becomes repetitive, I do find these kind of bug reports extremely useful, because they also convey the impact it has on the user. I can easily identify with his reaction to this "feature", and if my software annoys people like that, I would really want to know. In fact, this kind of irritating software behavior is one of the reasons I ditched TB a long time ago. I'm sure that was considerable less useful than actually filing a mildly offensive bug report.
eli 15y ago
Well, I hope the customer got his money back.
lhnz 15y ago
I agree that he's impertinent and rude, but I wouldn't have banned him. The best way of dealing with certain people would be to patch bugzilla with the ability to block people for periods of time: a week, a couple of months, a year, forever.
- asadotzler 15y ago
  Bugzilla has the ability to block a user from using his or her account. that's what "banning" is in this context. That block can be lifted at any time. I regularly disable accounts for abuse, have a long conversation with that person and end up re-instating their account because they've come to understand that what they were doing was counter-productive and agreed not to do it more.
thedeuce 15y ago
Wow....what a bunch of weenies we are on the internets today. Just ignore the parts you don't like and take whats valuable... Sure some people say "why should such bullying be accepted", well you just have to ignore it to not accept it! It's called free speech, and he expresses himself in a certain manner, get over it. A truly open community wouldn't act like this and would come to a better resolution IMO. Hell maybe mozilla should give the guy a call and try to talk things over? Anyway, this is about my fill for drama llama for today :P
kahawe 15y ago
Title is way off on this one... It boils down to: > You've been warned repeatedly about the Bugzilla Etiquette rules, and you're still failing to respect them.
kstenerud 15y ago
I see this as the open source equivalent of firing your customer. Just as there exists a certain kind of customer who increases the difficulty in running a business, so too there exists a certain kind of user who increases the difficulty in running an open source project. The project as a whole will be much healthier in the long run with the small percentage of users who generate the largest amount of grief removed from the equation. Richard is deliberately making things difficult for Firefox. It doesn't matter that he's "taking the time to highlight a bug". It doesn't matter what his street cred is. He's behaving like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum. If he started stomping his feet and screaming at someone in my house for serving the potatoes too soft, I'd throw him out. For reference (firing your customer): http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/the_customer_is.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/the_customer...
JimBlandy 15y ago
I don't understand why so many commenters on this thread consider verbal abuse a mark of sincerity. You can say everything you need to say without it. Mlynarik has pursued this style of interaction with people for decades, so it doesn't express any particular intensity of feeling; he just likes crapping on people. Maybe you don't mind reading it when it's not directed at you, but why should the recipient put up with it?
pbiggar 15y ago
If those comments were made on HN, they'd be voted down, flagged, and by now the poster would have been banned.
gatopeich 15y ago
I'm another Thunderbird user, who assumed its bugs will never get fixed and will jump to a better alternative when I see it. I fully sympathize with that Richard guy, and share his discontent at this serious issue happening in too many open source projects: the "community before quality" meme. Some people just don't understand that without quality the project will just die. Slowly but surely. Some other people seem to just want to see their name in the credits, even if they essentially screw the project in the process. Screw them, if that's what they think. Did anybody notice that the bug had been clinging there for +15 months and it had 12 duplicates submitted by users and there were being ignored??? Also, as an experienced developer I can't figure a reasonable justification to the injection of such bug in the first place, specially when a beta-tester reported it in due time. Breaking the behavior of Ctrl-F is an awesomely visible and annoying bug!!! Regarding the insults, well, when you know that nothing will be done to improve things and you are essentially wasting your time there, you don't f*ing care about being banned.

76 points by AndrewDucker 15y ago

good.

Richard Mlynarik is a hacker with a deservedly excellent reputation. And sometimes he has a sharp tongue which in context can be both enjoyable and terrifying. But here's the important part for entrepreneurs: what percentage of users of mozilla products or any product bother to submit bug reports? What Richard is doing here is investing his time into making Mozilla better. I am always amazed at the projects and companies that hold their users in contempt and get upset when bug reports or forum messages express a user's frustration. What they should be doing is sincerely expressing their thanks that the user would give them any message at all, and not just switch to a competitor, or just badmouth them to their friends. I see nothing in this bug report that deserves banning, and it is certainly Mozilla's loss and their user's loss that they would ban Mlynarik instead of listening to him. And to make matters worse, he's absolutely correct here too.

MrUnknown 15y ago
He was being a complete idiot in his bug report. The moderator stated that he has been warned many times before. He completely deserved to be banned after being warned that his actions will result in being banned. Sure, he is submitting bug reports, but his childish behavior shouldn't have to be tolerated because of this.
- vijaydev 15y ago
  We don't know the earlier instances where he was warned. IMHO, this particular bug report doesn't seem to be out of line with the rules here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html
  - asadotzler 15y ago
    But you could look if you wanted to. How about when he called Thunderbird developers simians and said he wanted to cut off their hands so they couldn't program any more? Is that out of line enough for you? What about saying "screw you" and calling developers children. I consider all of that out of line. He was being a bully and he got banned for it. Good on Dan Mosedale. Bullies suck and we shouldn't let them pollute our communities with their abuse.
    - vijaydev 15y ago
      Yes, I saw one in a link posted above. Definitely out of line. No second thoughts on that. If the ban had happened in reply to one such post, it would have been unquestioned by many.
      - asadotzler 15y ago
        Yeah, unfortunately for everyone he was only warned on the worst of the interactions and given a second chance. Sometimes a ban on the first offense is better. Still, a ban after a failure to heed a warning seems completely reasonable. Heck, a re-evaluation of the original interaction with the knowledge of how he behaved after the warning would have worked too. But again, the important thing isn't where the ban happened, it's that the project rejected a bully.
        chittis 15y ago
        The important thing is exactly when and why the ban happened. As others have pointed out, his latest bug report that got him banned was hugely better than his older bug report filled with personal insults that got him a warning. This shows that he took the warning seriously enough to stop the personal attacks. Banning him now makes me think the developers of Thunderbird are ego maniacs.
- gojomo 15y ago
  If this report is representative, I don't think a thousand similar reports would deserve a ban. There's some exasperation, some sarcasm, some foot-stomping while expressing strong opinions. But there's no profanity or insults. The strongest negative word used is 'stupid', and it's applied to a question in the UI, not any person. The details and rationale for considering the software's behavior an interaction faux pas are strong. It's hard to even see which part of 'Bugzilla Etiquette' this report violates: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html If other reports are worse, that's another matter. But if so, it seems odd this relatively mild report would be the final trigger that brings down the banhammer. (If there's a reliable pattern of abuse, just wait for the next non-mild incident.)
  - sid0 15y ago
    No, if there's a track record of obscene bug reports, then the person involved shouldn't be given even the slightest bit of slack. edit: if I were dmose, I'd have banned him a year ago for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372#c2 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372#c2.
    - gojomo 15y ago
      If they need to punish obscene reports, punish for those, specifically. When they happen. Don't punish a mild, non-obscene report some other time. edit for your edit: Thanks for finding an earlier clearer example. That comment was unnecessarily personal and abusive. It deserved reprimand or censure. And if the reprimand(s) are responsible for the less-personal tone of the 2011-06-30 comment, compared to the 2010-07-21 comment, they're working to increase the signal-to-emotional-noise ratio. But the controversy of a hard ban for a lesser transgression now introduces new emotional noise.
      - sid0 15y ago
        While we might disagree on the exact mechanics, I think we can agree that any open-source community would be better without such people.
bdfh42 15y ago
Correct - it was a great bug report. Without the expression of frustration then the nature of the bug would not have been clear. Reports like this from my customers would be brilliant.
- asadotzler 15y ago
  Would you like your customers saying "screw you" and "I want to cut off your hands so you can't program any more"? I wouldn't.
  - Deestan 15y ago
    Of course not, but the one time they are acceptably civil isn't the time to bring out the ban hammer.
    - asadotzler 15y ago
      When they continue to be abusive after a warning it doesn't really matter where mechanically the actual trigger was pulled. It was the right call. It was a late call, in my opinion. I'd have banned him at the "cut off his hands" comment with no warning and now recourse. But again, late or not, it was the right call. No project should have to tolerate bullies. They are toxic to the project and they should be excised as soon as possible.
  - soulinafishbowl 15y ago
    Absolutely! His was the pefect bug report. A chef cooks for his patrons, and a performer pleases his audience, just as a programmer codes for the user. With his report you have a passionately described, no holds barred look into what you are causing the user to feel when using the software. Don't let it hurt your feelings, just take it on the chin and recognize that in trying to make something better, you have inadvertently forgotten the primary objective: user experience. Oftentimes bug reports like this may just be a rant without relevant technical details, but the wonderful thing about this report, is that he gives you the best of both worlds: You have extremely insightful user experience along with the relevant technical details on how to address the issue. Be grateful, and wish more reports exactly like this.
ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
It took Mozilla 10 years to get Sunbird to version 1.0, not to mention how long it took them to iron out Thunderbird's "imperfections". As for FireFox, if it weren't for the extensions and the "open source" sticker no one would care about FireFox. They need all the Richard Mlynariks they can get. And I am..er... WAS a hard core FireFox user (switched to chrome a year ago) and still am a heavy Thunderbird user. Mozilla needs to haul ass.
- gjm11 15y ago
  > They need all the Richard Mlynariks they can get. Only if each Richard Mlynarik they have increases the quality of the product. Do you have any reason to think it does? This particular Richard Mlynarik wasn't writing code for Firefox or Thunderbird (which is too bad because i hear he's an excellent hacker). He was submitting bug reports, most of them allegedly duplicates, full of inflammatory language. If you believe that bug reports filled with inflammatory language make a project work better than bug reports without it, then do please present your evidence for that. My own guess is that being rude to people may be effective in getting them to pay attention in the short term to your needs or wants rather than someone else's, but that it doesn't do anything to improve their overall productivity and may well make it worse by reducing their motivation.
  - ChrisNorstrom 15y ago
    I've had complete strangers on the the street tell me to my face that I was ugly. That's life. Oh well. Rude-ass Bug reports are better than no bug reports. Emotion 101: When people are pissed they curse. I agree with you, it would be beneficial for them not to but they do. I have a feeling a lot of the people who don't tolerate his language have never worked in customer service or with the public. Emotion happens, a LOT, learn to ignore it. Don't want to deal with it? Write a greasemonkey script that changes all the language you don't like into encouraging statements. All the programmers I know are very logical, stable people and it seems as a whole they're not used to erratic emotional behavior that people in customer service are used to seeing.
shii 15y ago
Richard Mlynarik is one of the developers for XEmacs and has contributed to coreutils in GNU. open up your terminal and type in man whoami.
- asadotzler 15y ago
  And that gives him the right to be a bully? To say he'd like to cut off a Thunderbird developers hands so he can't program any more? To call developers simians? Nothing gives anyone the right to come into Mozilla's Bugzilla and behave like that.
  - rothron 15y ago
    Simians include all old world monkeys and apes, including humans. While you might interpret it as being an insult, and it may have been meant as such, it is factually correct.
maranas 15y ago
Agreed. Any bug report from a user is valuable - the fact that he was frustrated enough to report it means that there is a problem that needs to be addressed.
- asadotzler 15y ago
  That's not strictly true. If you've already got a report of the issue from other more helpful users, then someone coming in and calling you names and threatening to physically harm you, that isn't necessarily adding value. We're very fortunate at Mozilla to have tens of thousands of but reporters who aren't bullies and who don't think because they wrote some GNU code once that they can threaten you and deride you. This means that the cost of kicking out the bullies is either trivial, or a net win.
- nirvdrum 15y ago
  Almost everyone files a bug report in frustration because you're filing an issue about something that doesn't work the way you think it should. But most people are considerably more civil about it. I really don't like to play the "free" card. Too often developers say "well, it's open source so fix it or stop complaining." I don't think that's right at all . . . especially if you've advocated people use your software. However, having been involved with a lot of OSS projects, I can say that the bugs that get fixed the fastest are the ones that affect the developers themselves. Anything that gets fixed above and beyond that is a developer being a nice person in volunteering his time to help someone else. More to the point: it's hard to get people to work for free when they're demoralized and bug reports like this are demoralizing. If I were involved with the project, he's about the absolute last person I'd try to please no matter how right he may be. So, while I'm neutral on the ban, the bug reporter has to realize this is a very ineffective way to win friends and get his issues resolved.
asadotzler 15y ago
I am amazed at projects that allow toxic people to disrupt and mistreat other project members. I'm amazed when people defend bullies because they've got some kind of oldschool hacker credibility. Not having to listen to "a hacker with a deservedly excellent reputation" say he'd like to cut off your hands so you can't code any more is absolutely not a loss to the project. It's a proper and right kind of excision to remove toxic bullies like that no matter how correct was the substance of their report. (And as it turns out, the overwhelming majority of his reports were duplicates of existing reports, so it's not even a loss of the actual bug reports, just the nasty name calling and abusive and threatening behavior. I call that a win for the project.)
- jerrya 15y ago
  " I'm amazed when people defend bullies because they've got some kind of oldschool hacker credibility." I actually said nothing like this, did I? What I actually said, a) he's has a reputation as a very smart individual, and for good reason, and b) his bug report specifically was not bullying at all, but was precise, accurate, and passionate. For what it's worth though, I don't find his calling a developer to be a simian to be offensive, I find it funny. I don't find his imagery of reaching through a monitor to cut off the fingers of someone to be offensive, or threatening, I find it amusing, and illustrative of his frustration at being ignored once more. I find your behavior in this forum, of repeatedly bringing up these lame examples of why he should be banned to be offensive. And more offensive in light of how you have not explained who you are. But the truth is, I use Chrome. And when I need an alternative browser, I turn to Opera or IE. I rarely use Firefox products anymore, because they are horrible. And I understand why they are horrible, it's because you guys are off in your own world and have no time or need to actually listen to your users, us guys that have been telling you for years of your bloat and your feature creep and your memory problems, and all the other crap you've tossed in there.
  - nsomaru 15y ago
    There is a decided difference between emotion and reason. Frustration is an expression of emotion and has no place in a bug report. A bug report should factually describe a problem and the steps a dev can take to reproduce them. Your frustration is a symptom of your own unmet expectations. The problem with _any_ expectation is that (being constant) it is bound to be unmet, eventually, given that the world is in a state of continuous change. So you can either lose your cool, or understand that this is the nature of the world, adapt and move on. The title of this post has "click bait" plastered all over it, and that single post takes the whole thing out of context. I'm sorry I fell for it. Google _all_ his bug reports and understand in the context.
Confusion 15y ago
What Richard is doing here is investing his time into making Mozilla better. Unfortunately, no matter how awesome he is for investing his time and no matter how useful his bug reports are, his bug reports are also so offensive, unconstructive and discouraging that it's deemed better for the community to ban him. I can understand and support that decision, although I may have chosen otherwise.
grandinj 15y ago
No, if he was really "investing his time", he'd be producing good, well-written bug reports, and, since he's such an awesome hacker, writing patches. Instead, he vents his frustrations on bugzilla and generally acts like an ass.
kahawe 15y ago
So because allegedly he is some "rock star", he should be allowed to violate their etiquette repeatedly?

wladimir 15y ago

Good. When filing bug reports you should try to work with the team and be as helpful as possible in solving the issue. Being a dick does not help anyone.

vijaydev 15y ago
Expressing frustrations is not being a dick.
- MrUnknown 15y ago
  Expressing frustrations in a completely smart ass way is being a dick.
  - Kapelson 15y ago
    Regardless of whether he was being a dick or not, the issue is still there. A helpful dick is still valuable, and banning him is really only hurting the project as a whole.
    - sid0 15y ago
      Not if the negative vibe driving volunteers who might actually fix bugs away outweighs the help provided.
    - MrUnknown 15y ago
      Most people don't tend to respond well to these types of complaints. I used to work as customer service for a website and would constantly get sarcastic help requests. It made me hate them and I certainly didn't want to help them. In fact, I either ignored the ticket or just responded slowly as I handled tickets with more reasonable people. The people saying this is a "great" ticket and wish more reports were given this way are full of it. You will very quickly get tired of it because you realize you are doing everything you can to help them and they really don't care enough to give you enough respect to speak with you as a human being in a conversation. Instead choosing to be sarcastic and insult your efforts to help. I see this the other way around. I am thankful a huge bunch of volunteers spend many hours of their day creating software I use daily without having to pay for it. They don't deserve to be treated like this.

BasDirks 15y ago

How on earth does that deserve a ban? Mozilla would hate to have Linus Torvalds as a contributor.

masklinn 15y ago
> How on earth does that deserve a ban? That does not deserve a ban in and of itself. Repeated instances of that following warnings of unacceptable behavior, on the other hand, does. It would seem Richard here was in the second situation: > You've been warned repeatedly about the Bugzilla Etiquette rules, and you're still failing to respect them.
- BasDirks 15y ago
  The "offender" could/should be more polite, but enforcing etiquette mustn't stifle progress. I don't mind the downvotes, but could you add why you disagree?
  - Robin_Message 15y ago
    Commenting about why you should be downvoted might stifle progress (of your karma downwards.)
    - BasDirks 15y ago
      I'm here for discussion, not karma.
- felipemnoa 15y ago
  Linus has no qualms of telling someone he is full of BS: http://pardel.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/90/ http://pardel.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/90/
  - masklinn 15y ago
    Which really is irrelevant to the subject at hand.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

asadotzler 15y ago

It's my opinion that when you call a Thunderbird developer "some simian" and when you tell them to "Die die die die" and "Seriously, screw you" and you say things like "You know, every time I see a comment from [a specific Thunderbird developer] I just want to reach out through the intertubes and cut off his damned fingers to prevent him ever writing any code..." and when you're warned in a very civil tone with a clear explanation of why your approach is hurting rather than helping https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372#c3 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372#c3 and you still come back with more of that same approach, I think being banned from Bugzilla is a perfectly reasonable thing.

shii 15y ago
You're right, he is being a little abrasive there, but I'd take it in stride and enjoy; this sort of thing is normal on the Internet. And besides, he's right. Why did they replace cmd-f like that?
- adw 15y ago
  Why should we accept unnecessarily abrasive behaviour as acceptable anywhere?
  - shii 15y ago
    Because sometimes actually helpful bug reports come packaged with snarky people. I see little problem with that. There's guys like zedshaw who always flame and get flamed, yet still provide lots of value. Plus it livens things up a bit. Nothing wrong with a little sarcastic banter here and there. Some people have their panties in a tight knot sometimes over some silly things. Not everything has to be so srs bznss all the time folks. From this banning, Mozilla has just lost a useful bug reporter and one of the founding fathers of GNU.
    - asadotzler 15y ago
      Being a founding father of GNU does not give you the right to be a bully. Telling a developer that you want to cut off his hands so he can't program is not helpful and people who behave like that are not useful bug reporters. They are bullies and they are toxic to an open source project. No project should tolerate personal attacks like that.

keyle 15y ago

I'd call this "how not to deal with customer feedbacks". If it were paying customers, they'd have none left with this attitude!

ww520 15y ago
Sure you can take abuse when you are paid, except they are doing it for free and deserve better treatment.
- wccrawford 15y ago
  Except that most companies don't. Abusive customers are bad for the whole company and the other customers. They lower morale, raise costs, and are generally not worth the money they bring in. So if a company wouldn't do it for money, why would someone take that abuse for free? They wouldn't. And they didn't.
asadotzler 15y ago
You would accept one of your 100,000 paying customers who comes into your workplace shouting "die die die" and telling you he'd like to cut off your fingers so you can't work any more? After telling him that wasn't appropriate when he came back days or weeks later calling you a simian and shouting at you, you'd deal with it how? By inviting him into your office? I doubt it. I suspect you'd kick him out or call the cops to haul him off.

arihant 15y ago

If someone writes that kind of bug report for code that I write, the first thing I would do is take my shoe and beat myself to death. The man being frustrated is your fault. High chances there are million others who feel the same, at least he is conveying it to you. You're shooting the messenger here. If your critics give up on you and stop telling you how much you suck and how much they hate you, that's a very bad place to be in.

asadotzler 15y ago
If your critic is a bully and he comes into your workplace saying he'd like to physically maim you so you can't work any more and calls you names and think it's OK because he was, (in his own words, while he's verbally abusing you) "the second person after Stallman to ever write any GNU code" then I think you'd call him a bully, treat his attempts at participation as toxic, and kick him out of your workplace. You might even call the cops. Actually, you would call the cops. And you'd be right to.
- arihant 15y ago
  Sure I will. But if he writes me a letter letting me know that I suck and that I should rather die than writing buggy code making millions of lives miserable everyday, I'd be fine. He didn't throw stones at Mozilla labs, he filed and commented on a bug report. Its just text, not a man in their office. Virtual != Real. Its a mind over matter issue. And as Twain would agree..if you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
  - asadotzler 15y ago
    I'm arguing that it's just as toxic in a bug report as in the real world (maybe even worse considering it's not ephemeral in a bug report and many more people are likely to be exposed to it.) And I'm arguing that what's reasonable in the physical world, kicking people out who are abusive, is reasonable in our online meeting places like Bugzilla. I may not personally mind, but I'm not easily bullied. I've got a pretty thick skin too. But that should not be a requirement for participating in our project.
  - 15y ago

hollerith 15y ago

Reminds me of Eric Naggum on comp.lang.lisp in the late 1990s. Although I have no memories of Eric's ever threatening anyone with violence, he wrote hundreds of very long very angry harangues, most containing insults and ad-hominems -- and (unlike Richard Mlynarik) he seemed to believe deep down that his debating opponents wanted to harm him. As in the present case, people argued that for Eric to continue his abuse would harm Lisp by driving away contributors and adoptees. Difference is that it was very difficult to ban someone from a newsgroup, and Eric never was.

xyzzyz 15y ago
Yeah, they were really strong and aggresive, and I really would people not to be like this, but at least I do not recall him attacking anyone else first. When the issue at hand was purely technical, he was really civil and really to the point.

kermitthehermit 15y ago

Mozilla is trying to be like Google with Thunderbird and Firefox, but they are failing. This guy who's getting / who got banned deserved it, but the changes they keep making aren't all that good. Firefox is eating a lot of memory, Thunderbird does odd things at times. A friend has 500 corporate workstations which are running Firefox 3.6.x and Thunderbird 3.1.x. Will he upgrade them to the newer versions, in which they keep pouring poorly tested code? No, he will switch to something else.

rickmb 15y ago

Although Mozilla would be quite right to ban someone if this kind of behavior becomes repetitive, I do find these kind of bug reports extremely useful, because they also convey the impact it has on the user. I can easily identify with his reaction to this "feature", and if my software annoys people like that, I would really want to know. In fact, this kind of irritating software behavior is one of the reasons I ditched TB a long time ago. I'm sure that was considerable less useful than actually filing a mildly offensive bug report.

eli 15y ago

Well, I hope the customer got his money back.

lhnz 15y ago

I agree that he's impertinent and rude, but I wouldn't have banned him. The best way of dealing with certain people would be to patch bugzilla with the ability to block people for periods of time: a week, a couple of months, a year, forever.

asadotzler 15y ago
Bugzilla has the ability to block a user from using his or her account. that's what "banning" is in this context. That block can be lifted at any time. I regularly disable accounts for abuse, have a long conversation with that person and end up re-instating their account because they've come to understand that what they were doing was counter-productive and agreed not to do it more.

thedeuce 15y ago

Wow....what a bunch of weenies we are on the internets today. Just ignore the parts you don't like and take whats valuable... Sure some people say "why should such bullying be accepted", well you just have to ignore it to not accept it! It's called free speech, and he expresses himself in a certain manner, get over it. A truly open community wouldn't act like this and would come to a better resolution IMO. Hell maybe mozilla should give the guy a call and try to talk things over? Anyway, this is about my fill for drama llama for today :P

kahawe 15y ago

Title is way off on this one... It boils down to: > You've been warned repeatedly about the Bugzilla Etiquette rules, and you're still failing to respect them.

kstenerud 15y ago

I see this as the open source equivalent of firing your customer. Just as there exists a certain kind of customer who increases the difficulty in running a business, so too there exists a certain kind of user who increases the difficulty in running an open source project. The project as a whole will be much healthier in the long run with the small percentage of users who generate the largest amount of grief removed from the equation. Richard is deliberately making things difficult for Firefox. It doesn't matter that he's "taking the time to highlight a bug". It doesn't matter what his street cred is. He's behaving like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum. If he started stomping his feet and screaming at someone in my house for serving the potatoes too soft, I'd throw him out. For reference (firing your customer): http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/the_customer_is.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/the_customer...

JimBlandy 15y ago

I don't understand why so many commenters on this thread consider verbal abuse a mark of sincerity. You can say everything you need to say without it. Mlynarik has pursued this style of interaction with people for decades, so it doesn't express any particular intensity of feeling; he just likes crapping on people. Maybe you don't mind reading it when it's not directed at you, but why should the recipient put up with it?

pbiggar 15y ago

If those comments were made on HN, they'd be voted down, flagged, and by now the poster would have been banned.

gatopeich 15y ago

I'm another Thunderbird user, who assumed its bugs will never get fixed and will jump to a better alternative when I see it. I fully sympathize with that Richard guy, and share his discontent at this serious issue happening in too many open source projects: the "community before quality" meme. Some people just don't understand that without quality the project will just die. Slowly but surely. Some other people seem to just want to see their name in the credits, even if they essentially screw the project in the process. Screw them, if that's what they think. Did anybody notice that the bug had been clinging there for +15 months and it had 12 duplicates submitted by users and there were being ignored??? Also, as an experienced developer I can't figure a reasonable justification to the injection of such bug in the first place, specially when a beta-tester reported it in due time. Breaking the behavior of Ctrl-F is an awesomely visible and annoying bug!!! Regarding the insults, well, when you know that nothing will be done to improve things and you are essentially wasting your time there, you don't f*ing care about being banned.