[Mailman-Developers] Done.

Jo Rhett jrhett at netconsonance.com
Thu Mar 27 18:12:31 CET 2008


I've been incredibly tolerant of being abused on this issue for 3 weeks 
now, but the now-constant flood of people coming forward to say that I'm 
not respecting the mailman community is too funny.  It breaks the bounds 
of reality.

*I* did one thing.  I pointed out an issue that *EVERYONE* knows about, 
even the non-technical news media.  I asked that something be done soon. 
  I wrote my post clearly and politely.
 
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2008-March/019804.html

Did I receive a respectful response addressing these issues from anyone 
who writes code for the project?

Yes: Mark Sapiro wrote me a respectful reply on March 5.
 
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2008-March/019807.html

But that reply only negated my suggestions, with no solutions proposed.

I attempted to respond to the insults and derision I received in most of 
the replies with honest, straightforward answers.  Even when the 
questions were hopelessly supercilious and rude.

At this time there has been more effort spent writing me back saying 
that I'm not respecting the community than it would have taken to write 
patches to fix the problem.  I've certainly wasted more time here than I 
did writing my patches and testing them in the first place.

I respected the community by coming here and trying to address the 
issue, rather than simply blacklisting Mailman sites.  I respected the 
community by replying to everyone who replied to me, rather than 
ignoring the posts filled with derision or technical nonsense.  Perhaps 
that was a mistake.

I had a nice dinner with a number of people last night on this topic, 
and not a single person (all of whom witnessed this thread) felt that 
trying to address this issue here was producing any results.

So I am done.  Keep your derision to yourself, and keep wasting time 
telling people how they should respect you rather than solve the problem.

I am right now updating our AUP documentation to mention that Mailman is 
explicitly banned unless the person provides documentation of the 
configuration/patches they have applied to prevent backscatter.  I am 
notifying the known mailman sites within our network.  We are done with 
this issue.

-- 
Jo Rhett
Net Consonance ... net philanthropy, open source and other randomness


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