[python-committers] Anatoly has been warned about his behaviour potentially leading to his loss of tracker privileges

[Ned Deily]

On Nov 29, 2013, at 12:12 , Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

> The question is, how effective will the alternative solution (banning him) be? I worry that it's just going to make things worse.

I think that is a legitimate concern and likely outcome.

> The key thing to understand here is that you can't win an argument with Anatoly. You can only avoid *getting* into one.

Right.  We can't change other people's behavior.  We can at best encourage change.  In this case, I'm doubtful that banning would serve as an encouragement.  I understand the many of us get annoyed and frustrated by his comments and the multiple re-opening of the tracker issue thing the other day was certainly uncalled-for behavior on his part.  But it was likely fueled in part by people's reaction to his comments.  I think the more important issue here is not his behavior but our behavior in how we react to behavior like this.  *That* is something we can reasonably try to change.  Why is it that we find him so annoying, enough to advocate fairly drastic measures like banning?  There have been and will be others who behave similarly.  I don't propose to try to answer that question: it's one that each of us will have our own answer to.

But taking the active step of banning could become additional fuel.  Since he has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to ignore the advice and admonitions of others in our communities, it seems to me that a quite reasonable response is to, in turn, ignore him and just not engage with him.   Comparing his behavior to some of the recent, on-going cases of wildly inappropriate behavior on python-list (not involving Anatoly), I think it would be hard to justify to the world banning Anatoly for his relatively minor annoyances when it took so long to do something about one help vampire whose behavior and the community's reaction severely damaged its atmosphere and really did scare new people away.  (Yes, there are other important differences but this is about perceptions.)

> I guess I haven't managed to teach you all well enough how to do this. Honestly it's not easy. :-(

It's not but it is an important skill.

> When I see this kind of thing happen to people who have already contributed positively but haven't been around long enough to recognize specific trolls I usually send them an off-line message suggesting to ignore the troll. This happens a few times a year, and it's not just Anatoly.

Sound like exactly the right thing to do.

--
  Ned Deily
  nad at acm.org -- []