There is a good chance that everyone in that thread except the original maintainer is in on the act. It's likely that all those accounts are managed by a single person or group. Targeting just one account for rudeness isn't going to help, if that's true.
The mechanism employed here seems like the good cop, bad cop interrogation/negotiation technique. There is the one person who has taken care to show cultural and mission alignment. Then there are several misaligned actors applying pressure which the first person can relieve.
It does help on the social/psychological side. If you, as an open source project maintainer, have a policy that such rudeness is not acceptable, you are much less likely to become a successful victim of a social attack like this.
It's entirely possible for an evildoer to make someone feel bad while remaining completely polite.
First send a message to the mailing list as "Alice" providing a detailed bug report for a real bug, and a flawless patch to fix it.
Then you reply to the mailing list as "Bob" agreeing that it's a bug, thanking "Alice" for the patch and the time she spent producing such a detailed bug report, then explaining that unfortunately it won't be merged any time soon, then apologising and saying you know how frustrating it must be for Alice.
Your two characters have been model citizens: Alice has contributed a good quality bug report, and code. Bob has helped the project by confirming bug reports, and has never been rude or critical - merely straightforward, realistic and a bit overly polite.
As someone else said in this thread, scammers are often rude, because it makes people act fast, polite responses give them time to think. Of course, people are very easily manipulated. But by completely rejecting rudeness and having the mindset to not let others put pressure on me, you will improve the odds by a lot.
That would be true if you could ban the person from using new emails, but I don't think that's true when the thread if rife with sock puppet accounts. You ban the first rude email account, then there will be 2 new accounts complaining about both the lack of commits and the "heavy-handed mailing-list moderation" stifling differing views.
Yep, as the attacker you bias the entire playing field to your side. If a mailing list has 20 or so users on it, you create 50 accounts over time that are nice, helpful, and set a good tone. Then later you come in with your attack and the pushy assholes. Suddenly those 50 puppets just slightly side with the asshole. Most people break under that kind of social pressure and cave to the jerks request.
Absolutely right. Considering there is a whole cottage industry about asshole replies from Linus Torvalds on linux mailing lists.
For lesser/individual maintainers there is no way to survive this kind of mob attack. Corporate maintainers may be able to manage as it could be considered just as paid job and there are worse ways to make money.
The act relies on there being an extreme reluctance to ban. Once the banhammer has been used, the act kind of falls apart. Of course, difference pressure campaigns can then be brought to bear.
We live in an adversarial environment, time to stop playing naively nice. Ideally it isn't the maintainer that has to do all this work.
