Re: Should mailing list bans be published?

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 02:33:34PM -0500, Brian Gupta a écrit :
> 
> I don't know the answer but perhaps, we can try experimenting with a system
> where the first action is a polite public warning by listmaster, pointing to
> code of conduct. (Assuming that the code of conduct is updated to cover
> this.)

Hello everybody,

I think that we should also encourage anybody (not just the listmasters) to
send complain messages in private first.  Public reminders should be the last
ressort, not because of considerations on the person receiving the reminder,
but because the very high probability that it triggers the sending of more and
more off-topic messages.

To take a concrete example, in last month's thread about systemd, I sent a
public comment about "assuming good faith", and I hesitated a lot about making
it private.  I sent it in public because at that point, I thought that it was
important to compensate the harsh message by an appreciation to the Gnome
developers, but the cost of it was an extra 8 messages that probably would
never have been posted otherwise: "censorship !" -> "no it isn't" -> "angriness
is not surprising" -> "no it is" -> "no it isn't, go figure yourself" -> "you
are contradicting yourself" -> "what do you mean ?" -> "please stop off-topic
discussion" (which thankfully was listened).  Altogether, I am not sure that I
made the right choice.

Cheers,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan