Does appropriate response to "immaturity" or "ignorance" need to be public?

[yaseppochi]

(If you're new to Overload-SIG, it's about the problem that some of our senior developers feel overloaded with information, list traffic, and sometimes hostility on the mailing lists, despite general conformance to CoC. We're looking at both technical and social solutions.)

In a thread on python-ideas (rooted at https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2017-January/044134.html), Guido suggested that the appropriate response to such "trolling" is a deafening silence, and Steven d'Aprano responded that the "silent treatment" is not conformant to the CoC when the poster is new and not a known troll from other channels.

A way to resolve these two points of view would be for members to engage the new member off-list (this begs the question of how to avoid spamming the new member by multiple do-gooders, some convention could be established to communicate to the list).

Are there reasons why such "educational activity" should be posted to the list where the thread starts?

[warsaw]

On Jan 10, 2017, at 09:17 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

A way to resolve these two points of view would be for members to engage the new member off-list (this begs the question of how to avoid spamming the new member by multiple do-gooders, some convention could be established to communicate to the list).

Are there reasons why such "educational activity" should be posted to the list where the thread starts?

Something that many email forums used to do back in the day was to put together a netiquette document and post it to the list once a month. That seems like a low cost way of handling education of common values to newcomers.

[PythonCHB]

I think the best way is in between:

A (single) public polite message explaining why this particular post/thread/topic is inappropriate for the list -- and then silence.

This has been employed frequently on python-dev in particular. Python-ideas is more free form, so we Kibitzers tend to engage when perhaps we shouldn't. But a post, particularly from s major contributed to the list, early on might quiet us down.

The problem with a private reply is that no one else knows it's been sent.

Of course, anyone that

[PythonCHB]

Oops- darn fat fingers on a phone!

Anyone that wants to have an actual conversation can do so offline.

[gvanrossum]

I feel that a lot of the regulars fall in the "someone is wrong on the internet" trap: https://xkcd.com/386/

On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 9:11 AM, Christopher H.Barker, PhD < notifications@github.com> wrote:

Oops- darn fat fingers on a phone!

Anyone that wants to have an actual conversation can do so offline.

— You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/python/overload-sig/issues/5#issuecomment-271929260, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ACwrMk1vC8MwashK58ioeJ80cHsE8KJqks5rRQ0ygaJpZM4LgNAh .

-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

[brettcannon]

Yes, I think a lot of us who have a institutional knowledge do fall into the trap of wanting to helpfully point out when someone is wrong since we know the answer, but then we have a major issue of stopping the chain of corrections passed the first one (negative side-effect of a helpful community 😉 ).

As for the suggestion by @warsaw , the problem is that at least on python-ideas people sign up and post immediately their specific idea, and so chances of them seeing or reading any etiquette document upfront is slim.

But that doesn't mean having a doc explaining what's appropriate and what isn't and simply posting a link to that doc publicly isn't unreasonable either. The problem that leads to is the fact that you can easily end up with 5 people sending the same link because email doesn't exactly sync quickly (something that has come up with the email-vs-Discourse-vs-GH discussions).

Best solution I can think of is that we flesh out https://cpython-devguide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/communication.html to either clearly state what mailing list to go to or a type of question/statement or we list each mailing list and what it is supposed to be used for (e.g. either more of a FAQ style or a do/don't style per list). Then either only list admins or select people post the link as a reply for saying "Unfortunately this post is off-topic for this mailing list; please see https://cpython-devguide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/communication.html." (or we change technology to solve the synchronization problem).

[warsaw]

On Jan 11, 2017, at 11:32 AM, Brett Cannon wrote:

As for the suggestion by @warsaw , the problem is that at least on python-ideas people sign up and post immediately their specific idea, and so chances of them seeing or reading any etiquette document upfront is slim.

We could set up a replybot with the same text so they'd be guaranteed to see it as soon as they subscribed. And we could set their mod bit by default so we'd need to see one sane post by them before we allow them to post unmoderated.

It wouldn't catch people who post through Gmane, but it's still better.

[brettcannon]

The moderation bit is probably the most straight-forward, but obviously it would need to not lead to a huge increase in workload for admins.

[yaseppochi]

This discussion seems to be moot. Closing.