If those comments were made on HN, they'd be voted down, flagged, and by now the poster would have been banned.
Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports
111–119 of 119 posts
Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should we accept unnecessarily abrasive behaviour as acceptable anywhere?
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…
I've been a participant in GNU since 1990. I've been a maintainer of GNU Emacs, GDB, Guile, and (briefly) EGLIBC, but many others have contributed a lot more than I have. Mlynarik's contributions to GNU are relatively minor. Calling him a "founding father of GNU" is a bit rich; it was pretty gratuitous of him to bring it up.
Note that Mlynarik could have made every single one of his contributions without verbally abusing anyone. It's not like you have to swear at someone to explain why you think something is a bug. He freely chose to add the abuse to his technical content. Since the abuse is utterly inessential, there's no reason to put up with it.
The abuse doesn't even express depth of feeling. He's always written like that, to pretty much everyone, in all circumstances. It's noise in his signal.
I think Mozilla is absolutely right to ban him from its sites. As someone said, "Sure, you have the right to be a jerk --- just not on my web site."
I'm amazed that HN readers are so backwards on this.
Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports
#113I 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.
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.
Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. Mozill…
> 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 belie…
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.
Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sta…
I agree with you that the title of this post is click bait, however, this statement: " Frustration is an expression of emotion and has no place in a bug report." Again, you're right, and again, you're wrong. Now we need moderators and rules and timeouts and bannination and more rules on how what as developers expect from bug reports? It's hard enough for users to make bug reports. What I want from bug reports is accu…
I'm not sure how the effort required by a user to file a bug report entitles him to use that system in a way not intended by the system itself. Effort != entitlement.
I'm not suggesting rules/moderation/banning, but a little private introspection by individuals before they act.
Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
While we might disagree on the exact mechanics, I think we can agree that any open-source community would be better without such people.
I couldn't agree with that. Imagine what the landscape of software would look like without all those abrasive "bullies" that Mozilla is wringing their hands about: no Theo, no Zed, no Steve, no Richard ... hell, no Linus, for that matter. So any open-source community would be better without them, eh?
Open-source community would surely be better without people being bullies. It's not like anyone's creative ability or technical excellence comes from bullying other people.
Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports
#117Reminds 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 w…
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.
Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.
Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports
#119I'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.