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Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports

bugzilla.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports

#61

Post by wccrawford »

ww520 wrote: post #48
keyle wrote: post #30

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

Sure you can take abuse when you are paid, except they are doing it for free and deserve better treatment.

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.

Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports

#62

Post by asadotzler »

keyle wrote: post #30

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

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.

Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports

#63

Post by asadotzler »

maranas wrote: post #22
jerrya wrote: post #3

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 compa…

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.

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.

Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports

#64

Post by kermitthehermit »

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.

Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports

#65

Post by asadotzler »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #58
sid0 wrote: post #27

Earlier 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?

I don't know about other open source communities. Perhaps they thrive on toxic environments full of bullies. But I do know quite a bit about the Mozilla community and I'm quite certain that we are better off without him.

Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports

#66

Post by gojomo »

asadotzler wrote: post #51
gojomo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not announce the ban after those blatant transgressions, or the next blatant one if they arrive reliably, rather than after a mild one? BTW, a simple Bugzilla search for [Richard Mlynarik] returns "Zarro Boogs found". Similarly, a Google search for [site:bugzilla.mozilla.org Mlynarik simian] returns nothing. I'm sure I'll find the right kind of search eventually – I did find a Mlynarik 'screw you' comment vi…

He was given a warning and a second chance after the awful behavior in other bugs. When he failed to heed that warning he was banned. If you had read the report, you'd have seen that he had been given a previous warning. That's key information. Weren't you curious about the previous warning? Didn't it occur to you that he might have already been treading on really thin ice and continued misbehavior, even minor might…

"if you had read the report"? "weren't you curious"?

It should have been clear from my conditionals ("If this report is representative…"; "If other reports are worse…") that I was curious about the alluded-to prior history, and my analysis was contingent upon the (at the time unlinked) specifics.

The concern I still have is that this latest comment was so mild and non-insulting that one possible interpretation is that the previous warning(s) were working. He depersonalized his criticisms into the zone where, if judged dispassionately, they could be more more helpful than hurtful.

Now, you've also been quoting other incidents ("simians", "die die die") that might be more recent and salient. I can't find the context for those. (Searches only turn up this thread.)

But I am only opining on the exact comments and actions referenced here. I'm not defending any particular person (who I don't know), but one most recent comment. And I'm not criticizing a general policy of exiling recidivist assholes, only the act of pulling the trigger after a comment that, standing alone, is innocuous.

If someone else over the years posted a thousand comments with the same level of sarcasm and exasperation, but also the same level of actual useful info (and no insults), as in Mlynarik's most recent comment, would they get a ban? Or even a warning? I suspect not. They'd just be considered a cranky but useful bug reporter.

Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports

#67

Post by arihant »

asadotzler wrote: post #60
arihant wrote: post #35

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 p…

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 mig…

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.

Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports

#68

Post by gjm11 »

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #19
jerrya wrote: post #3

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 compa…

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 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.

Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports

#69

Post by nirvdrum »

maranas wrote: post #22
jerrya wrote: post #3

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 compa…

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.

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.

Re: Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports

#70

Post by NoJoke »

adw wrote: post #29
shii wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Why should we accept unnecessarily abrasive behaviour as acceptable anywhere?

Is this some type of joke? Internet trolls rule the internet.

Most of you, seriously, are just plain jerks. But so what.

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