first post:Hi, it appears that running Pkg.add("IJulia") is broken. Please fix it or stop advertising this module...
first response: This is a volunteer effort. We regret to inform you that reports and issues in the tone of the above complaint are unacepptable. We cannot (and will not) help you until you ask for help in a polite way.
Status changed: from "open" to "awaiting politeness"
---
The world contains people who want to act like this @aragnon. It will still contain those people tomorrow. Complaining about their sense of entitlement is not likely to achieve much. And we need to spend very little effort with these requests. We need procedure. We need simple rules, and absolute enforcement.
I don't know that Ijulia is, but I thank you guys for your efforts!
If the problem reported is real and affects many users, then I don't see how refusing to fix it because the person who actually reported it is an ass is reasonable. You are essentially suggesting that all users who experience the problem be punished because the one who reported it is a jerk.
No, I like it. The jerk is shut down and not rewarded until he can communicate like a civilized person. The person who shuts him down can still pick up on the complaint and get the bug fixed for everyone else - and if not, then any widespread problem will eventually have at least one polite request entered, right?
Very inflammatory title. This happens occasionally, but I'd hardly call it "the environment that OSS developers work in." Furthermore, this really has little to do with OSS or even software development at all. The world is filled with rude and insensitive people that can't interact with others courteously and professionally. That is not news nor is it interesting.
This is < 1% of our users.We run a gitter channel with > 1000 people in it as well as around 1700 stars on github. I've seen some things but most people are polite. This is just cherry picked.
In 1924, William Faulkner quit his job as a postal worker, saying "I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp". With regards to FLOSS, people don't even have to invest the two cents. Which highlights the rudeness of some people - they rudely demand that people who donate their free time to help people, donate even more of their time to fix a problem.
While this is unfortunate, as Faulkner noted, it's not unique to FLOSS. Anyone who is in a position where they regularly interact with the public is going to run into rude people and crazies now and again.
Really surprised they didn't shut down the thread sooner and I'm a little disappointed the devs didn't get a better "zinger" in there at the end, but major props to yuyichao for being a class act the whole way through. I don't think I would have had the patience to continue helping after that tirade.
If you're https://github.com/meddlepal, your projects sound interesting, but try writing a bit more in your README.md :)
People will start using your projects if they see a use for it, so you "just" need to make something random internet people want, and then sell it well.
I understand that the user had a very inflammatory attitude, but the dev helping the user actually agreed with his concerns. Yeah, the user wasn't being nice, but the dev was nice anyway. This happens everywhere, every day, in real life. It's not just the Internet's veil of anonymity, it's just that people are mad for reasons often beyond what you can see.
It looks like the user just needed to vent, and the dev seemed to ignore it. And that's what you should do. Trying to interact meaningfully with an emotion that doesn't mean anything will not help you. Pointing to community standards will often only aggravate mad people further. Either help the person or lock the issue and leave it at that.
Calling out specific people publicly in HN posts is not a good idea either. If you must, I suggest anonymizing the content.
Welcome to customer support at every organization everywhere. Many people who are have problems with your project (whether it be a paid or free product) are jerks about it. Sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong, but it's going to have no effect on their attitude.
Julia is within their rights to enforce a community standard against such rants, but I wonder if those rants are what inspire people to write code and contribute (unpaid) patches...
I used to work in QA. I file lots of bugs on github. (Hopefully politely.) But I've never committed anything - I don't even know how. Does that make my reports worthless?
Of course they're not worthless when you're submitting them in good faith with due diligence in troubleshooting/replicating steps. I <3 users, whether they write code or not that submit good bug reports and are willing to work with me to replicate/fix the issue. One does not need to be a developer to write a good bug report.
I volunteer a few days every month to triage bug reports at my developer job just to keep up my troubleshooting skills. I could probably not do this as a technical/team lead, but everyone on my team does, so I wouldn't make them do anything I wouldn't do. I like problem solving as well, so it can be fun trying to hunt down some obscure bug buried in a service that only manifests itself when the moons align in the customer environment.
Seeing some of the difficult customers our support staff have to pull information out of I have a ton of respect for those that organize bug reports in a coherent manner that shows they really care. Those that do, I go out of my way to help make their jobs easier (building them tools, simple scripting training, etc) and they pay it back by helping my development team.
That in itself? No. However, a number of the complaints made in TFA seem to be of the "bad perms" or "pointing at the wrong directory" variety. IOW not the software's fault, simply user carelessness. Perhaps the documentation could be clearer or the software could do more to figure shit out for itself and those really might prevent some such problems, but even occasional developers are more likely to look for such causes before filing bugs. This user should take his noise to Stack Overflow.
first post:Hi, it appears that running Pkg.add("IJulia") is broken. Please fix it or stop advertising this module...
first response: This is a volunteer effort. We regret to inform you that reports and issues in the tone of the above complaint are unacepptable. We cannot (and will not) help you until you ask for help in a polite way.
Status changed: from "open" to "awaiting politeness"
---
The world contains people who want to act like this @aragnon. It will still contain those people tomorrow. Complaining about their sense of entitlement is not likely to achieve much. And we need to spend very little effort with these requests. We need procedure. We need simple rules, and absolute enforcement.
I don't know that Ijulia is, but I thank you guys for your efforts!