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I've seen plenty of harassment which in principle insults code. It easy to say things like "Part X of the code base is a piece of ** and should be deleted", or

I've seen plenty of harassment which in principle insults code. It easy to say things like "Part X of the code base is a piece of ** and should be deleted", or "Recent PR 1234 is awful" -- no-one's name is mentioned, but everyone knows who is in charge of X, or who wrote PR 1234. In terms of "this sort of power", you are of course welcome to ignore them asking you to not tweet at them -- just don't expect to be allowed back into the community. It seams reasonable to me to say while you are in "time out" to not keep pestering the council, or Thunderbird community in general, during those 3 months.

FeepingCreature 4y ago
It seems deeply unreasonable, infantilizing and arrogant to me. Different preferences, maybe. It's the sort of thing I'd expect from a religion. > I've seen plenty of harassment which in principle insults code. It easy to say things like "Part X of the code base is a piece of * and should be deleted", or "Recent PR 1234 is awful" -- no-one's name is mentioned, but everyone knows who is in charge of X, or who wrote PR 1234. I think that's specifically the sort of feedback I want to embrace. Everybody writes awful code, it's normal. Not calling it awful doesn't make it better, and the goal of the project is good code over happy contributors - happy contributors only matter insofar as they lead to good code, and I think contributors who are made unhappy by people calling their code bad, probably don't write good code as a rule. (How do you get better if you shield yourself from negative feedback?)
- CJefferson 4y ago
  To me, there is a huge difference between "negative feedback" -- I don't think any project is saying you can't reply something like "This PR should not be merged, because there are significant problems. For example, line Q causes a memory leak, and lines A-B are so complicated I can't figure out if there is a buffer overflow or not". If you have examples where this kind of factual complaints are causing people to get banned, let me know. As a concrete example, I consider myself a reasonable coder -- I've contributed to a bunch of projects, including gcc. I've stopped contributing to projects (including gcc) because I got feedback which wasn't helpful, but was either hostile or at minimum extremely unhelpful. Did they want rid of me? Maybe so, but they certainly kept all the code I'd submitted, much of it to the current day.
  - rekabis 4y ago
    Hostile feedback is a great way to push anyone away. I tried to submit a big report to DD-WRT involving a somewhat important feature completely failing to function. I gave them all the details required to fully reproduce the bug on their end, which has been the standard for bug reports at every single company I have ever worked for. They threw it back in my face, demanding that I find the actual place in the code where the bug was happening, and that it wasn’t a proper “bug report” without that information. Sorry, but I just don’t have time for that level of arrogance. I provided exactly what the software industry demands for a bug report (workflow + reproducibility), it’s the support team’s job to use that spoon-fed info to dig into the code itself. I mean, it’s different if I was making or requesting a specific code change, but I wasn’t. While I am a programmer myself, I wasn’t going to swan-dive into a completely unfamiliar codebase written in an unfamiliar language and built using unfamiliar tooling and spend weeks (if not months) of my own time learning it, just to reach a conclusion that they could probably reach in an hour or three with their own experience and familiarity with the product.
    - FeepingCreature 4y ago
      I didn't really mean to push it that far, but it's actually really fun trying to formulate this without even using "you" or "I" or "they". All I can come up with is "This is not a proper bug report without a line number." - "Actually, it is." Which really says it all. :)
  - hedora 4y ago
    > If you have examples where this kind of factual complaints are causing people to get banned, let me know. From the email we are discussing: > Using facts to excuse disrespectful language.In a number of conversations where you have been called out for communicating disrespectfully, you counter by stating what you said is a fact. While in many cases it is truly a fact, the way in which you convey these facts has not been appropriate. The CPG requires that if someone says they have been harmed through your words or actions, listen carefully, apologize sincerely, and correct the behavior going forward.
    - 4y ago
yellowapple 4y ago
> I've seen plenty of harassment which in principle insults code. It easy to say things like "Part X of the code base is a piece of * and should be deleted", or "Recent PR 1234 is awful" -- no-one's name is mentioned, but everyone knows who is in charge of X, or who wrote PR 1234. I think this is more a matter of tone being hard to convey over text than such statements actually being harassment. Technical debt is more often than not nobody's fault in particular, yet often elicits similar commentary - and at least in in-person conversations, it's almost always clear that the commentary is directed at the code itself, not at the author - and hell, quite a few programmers will readily say such things about their own code (myself included).

FeepingCreature 4y ago

It seems deeply unreasonable, infantilizing and arrogant to me. Different preferences, maybe. It's the sort of thing I'd expect from a religion. > I've seen plenty of harassment which in principle insults code. It easy to say things like "Part X of the code base is a piece of * and should be deleted", or "Recent PR 1234 is awful" -- no-one's name is mentioned, but everyone knows who is in charge of X, or who wrote PR 1234. I think that's specifically the sort of feedback I want to embrace. Everybody writes awful code, it's normal. Not calling it awful doesn't make it better, and the goal of the project is good code over happy contributors - happy contributors only matter insofar as they lead to good code, and I think contributors who are made unhappy by people calling their code bad, probably don't write good code as a rule. (How do you get better if you shield yourself from negative feedback?)

CJefferson 4y ago
To me, there is a huge difference between "negative feedback" -- I don't think any project is saying you can't reply something like "This PR should not be merged, because there are significant problems. For example, line Q causes a memory leak, and lines A-B are so complicated I can't figure out if there is a buffer overflow or not". If you have examples where this kind of factual complaints are causing people to get banned, let me know. As a concrete example, I consider myself a reasonable coder -- I've contributed to a bunch of projects, including gcc. I've stopped contributing to projects (including gcc) because I got feedback which wasn't helpful, but was either hostile or at minimum extremely unhelpful. Did they want rid of me? Maybe so, but they certainly kept all the code I'd submitted, much of it to the current day.
- rekabis 4y ago
  Hostile feedback is a great way to push anyone away. I tried to submit a big report to DD-WRT involving a somewhat important feature completely failing to function. I gave them all the details required to fully reproduce the bug on their end, which has been the standard for bug reports at every single company I have ever worked for. They threw it back in my face, demanding that I find the actual place in the code where the bug was happening, and that it wasn’t a proper “bug report” without that information. Sorry, but I just don’t have time for that level of arrogance. I provided exactly what the software industry demands for a bug report (workflow + reproducibility), it’s the support team’s job to use that spoon-fed info to dig into the code itself. I mean, it’s different if I was making or requesting a specific code change, but I wasn’t. While I am a programmer myself, I wasn’t going to swan-dive into a completely unfamiliar codebase written in an unfamiliar language and built using unfamiliar tooling and spend weeks (if not months) of my own time learning it, just to reach a conclusion that they could probably reach in an hour or three with their own experience and familiarity with the product.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    I didn't really mean to push it that far, but it's actually really fun trying to formulate this without even using "you" or "I" or "they". All I can come up with is "This is not a proper bug report without a line number." - "Actually, it is." Which really says it all. :)
- hedora 4y ago
  > If you have examples where this kind of factual complaints are causing people to get banned, let me know. From the email we are discussing: > Using facts to excuse disrespectful language.In a number of conversations where you have been called out for communicating disrespectfully, you counter by stating what you said is a fact. While in many cases it is truly a fact, the way in which you convey these facts has not been appropriate. The CPG requires that if someone says they have been harmed through your words or actions, listen carefully, apologize sincerely, and correct the behavior going forward.
  - 4y ago

yellowapple 4y ago

> I've seen plenty of harassment which in principle insults code. It easy to say things like "Part X of the code base is a piece of * and should be deleted", or "Recent PR 1234 is awful" -- no-one's name is mentioned, but everyone knows who is in charge of X, or who wrote PR 1234. I think this is more a matter of tone being hard to convey over text than such statements actually being harassment. Technical debt is more often than not nobody's fault in particular, yet often elicits similar commentary - and at least in in-person conversations, it's almost always clear that the commentary is directed at the code itself, not at the author - and hell, quite a few programmers will readily say such things about their own code (myself included).