Mozilla now banning people for grumpy bug reports
bugzilla.mozilla.org
bugzilla.mozilla.org
You want us to consider context when talking about his most recent bug report being banned? OK, then we should also consider context when reading the "...every time I see a comment from [a specific Thunderbird developer]..." bug report too, because it's clear that this guy has had his objections and bug reports ignored a couple too many times.
Changing Command-F is broken ui. Period. You just don't do that. To an experienced, battle-weary developer, it's one of those blatantly obvious things that makes them want to scream at the sky.
Me? I would have just cussed at the software -- like I do every day at Firefox -- and then thrown my hands up, decided there wasn't much I could do because there isn't yet another option available, and gone on with my day. This guy is speaking for a ton of users who, like me, gave up the battle of communicating this kind of stuff over and over again.
I'm not writing this for you, though, because that would be a waste of my time. I'm writing it more as a caution to any other businesses that haven't yet fallen victim to this trap: listen to your customers, even when they're pissed off.
I wrote it here, too: http://robsheldon.com/ivorytower
I'm not sure if it is a sense of humor thing, but I don't get anger from his bugs at all. A bit of frustration, and colorful language. But that's not rage.
He's profoundly wasting his time by bothering to talk to Mozilla developers. I learned long ago that they are extremely cliquish, and don't care what you think. They will do whatever they feel like doing, whether or not it makes sense. Personally I quit using thunderbird when they pushed an updated, it broke the client, and their reply on the forum was more or less "too bad, sucker".
This is about this particular individual and whether he was adding more value than he was taking from the project. The decision was made that he was hurting more than helping and so he was kicked out.
Nursing a grudge against someone for a year, banning him for a grumpy bug report, then spamming discussion threads with hand-wringing about what a toxic abusive bully he was really seems like a waste of time to me. I guess you can "coordinate" your community however you like, though.
I know from experience that is is extremly frustrating and deeply insulting when a developer marks a valid bug report as "NOTABUG" or "WONTFIX", no matter how friendly he is while doing so. When somebody closes a bug report without taking any action whatsoever, without even acknowledging the problem, this feels to me just as if he said: "Shut the fuck up, we developers have better things to do than care about stupid users." It doesn't matter if the developer uses polite wording, I'm still insulted.
The drama you generate inside your own head is not the developer's responsibility.
Closing a bug as "NOTABUG" is not an insult. Closing a bug as "NOTABUG" means the developer does not think there is a bug. If you take it as an insult, then take responsibility for your own feelings. Don't blame the developer.
I'm not saying that a developer should leave bug reports open to avoid any possible offense. But they must be aware that the act of ignoring a perfectly valid issue reported by a passionate user can be demeaning in itself.
And besides, he's right. Why did they replace cmd-f like that?
Not everything has to be so srs bznss all the time folks.
From this banning, Mozilla has just lost a useful bug reporter and one of the founding fathers of GNU.
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You can make all the excuses you want for him, and you can re-define bullying if you like, but he has gone well beyond "not seeing the need to spare people's feelings" here. He has verbally attacked people and he thinks he can get away with it because of his hacker credibility. "Because I'm a great programmer and you're a nobody programmer, I can call you names and tell you to die die die and tell you I'd like to cut off your fingers so you can't code any more. That's about as crisp a case of bullying as I can think of.
Note that Mlynarik could have made every single one of his contributions without verbally abusing anyone. It's not like you have to swear at someone to explain why you think something is a bug. He freely chose to add the abuse to his technical content. Since the abuse is utterly inessential, there's no reason to put up with it.
The abuse doesn't even express depth of feeling. He's always written like that, to pretty much everyone, in all circumstances. It's noise in his signal.
I think Mozilla is absolutely right to ban him from its sites. As someone said, "Sure, you have the right to be a jerk --- just not on my web site."
I'm amazed that HN readers are so backwards on this.
They are somewhat known for their public moments sounding just like this guy.
Personalities are complex. We can't just cherry pick the attributes of a person and separate those from those which we perceive to deviate from the ideal.
Whether this particular guy is a net gain for the community isn't for me to decide (though I do love emacs, and use a lot of core GNU software), but if colorful language is the price I have to pay for their contributions to society, that value proposition is still a no brainer.
Anecdote: many of the brilliant developers I've worked near (the major outliers, 100x productivity types) have some kind of quirk. This could be that they snap sometimes, or that they don't shower, or that they neglect their paperwork. Give them some feedback, grow a thick skin, but don't ostracize them.
I'm not suggesting they'd disappear. I'm suggesting that they'd be forced into behaving in a more respectful manner to people.
People stop acting like tools when other people stop putting up with it.
Except that you're not paying any price at all. It's the Thunderbird community paying that price and there is no reason for them to do so. If your list of his accomplishments included making Thunderbird a great piece of software, we might be having a slightly different conversation. Also, kicking him out of Mozilla's bug system very likely has zero impact on your emacs and core GNU software.
IMO, being a hero on one project does not give you the right to be a bully on another.
That doesn't mean it needs to be tolerated. While such behaviour might be common on places like Xbox Live, I haven't seen anything like that on HN, for instance.
You complain about Mlynarik being a bully, and yet here you are, with your comments on this one post at about 18 now, all saying what a horrible person Mlynarik is, and how you think no developer should have to put up with him, and yet, I don't believe you've disclosed your role, or why you have such a dog in this race....
I haven't read each of your posts, so maybe I missed where you told everyone what your role is in this.
Anyway, I do see Richard, a user, being blunt and creative and passionate in the bug reports he gives to the developers. But I do not see how a user bug report should actually offend or bother a developer.... At all.
And I do see you wandering around this post making sure everyone understands your point of view, that Richard's behavior is intolerable anywhere, and you can confidently say that since you are such a tolerant guy. I guess you're passionate too, but I think it's borderline speech policing and gate-keeping behaviors.
Boo hoo, a user calls the developers simians. I actually thought that was pretty funny, along with the imagery of Richard reaching through the computer.
I hadn't realized that the Firefox developers, developers of one of the utmost free speech tools of the 20th and 21st centuries were such wilted flowers that they could not handle the frankly amusing, sarcastic, accurate, precise, correct bug reports from one of their more knowledgeable users.
But now I know.
There's a big difference between saying someone is a "horrible person" and calling out specific incidents of inappropriate behaviour.
But here's the important part for entrepreneurs: what percentage of users of mozilla products or any product bother to submit bug reports?
What Richard is doing here is investing his time into making Mozilla better. I am always amazed at the projects and companies that hold their users in contempt and get upset when bug reports or forum messages express a user's frustration. What they should be doing is sincerely expressing their thanks that the user would give them any message at all, and not just switch to a competitor, or just badmouth them to their friends.
I see nothing in this bug report that deserves banning, and it is certainly Mozilla's loss and their user's loss that they would ban Mlynarik instead of listening to him.
And to make matters worse, he's absolutely correct here too.
Not having to listen to "a hacker with a deservedly excellent reputation" say he'd like to cut off your hands so you can't code any more is absolutely not a loss to the project. It's a proper and right kind of excision to remove toxic bullies like that no matter how correct was the substance of their report.
(And as it turns out, the overwhelming majority of his reports were duplicates of existing reports, so it's not even a loss of the actual bug reports, just the nasty name calling and abusive and threatening behavior. I call that a win for the project.)
I actually said nothing like this, did I?
What I actually said, a) he's has a reputation as a very smart individual, and for good reason, and b) his bug report specifically was not bullying at all, but was precise, accurate, and passionate.
For what it's worth though, I don't find his calling a developer to be a simian to be offensive, I find it funny. I don't find his imagery of reaching through a monitor to cut off the fingers of someone to be offensive, or threatening, I find it amusing, and illustrative of his frustration at being ignored once more.
I find your behavior in this forum, of repeatedly bringing up these lame examples of why he should be banned to be offensive. And more offensive in light of how you have not explained who you are.
But the truth is, I use Chrome. And when I need an alternative browser, I turn to Opera or IE. I rarely use Firefox products anymore, because they are horrible. And I understand why they are horrible, it's because you guys are off in your own world and have no time or need to actually listen to your users, us guys that have been telling you for years of your bloat and your feature creep and your memory problems, and all the other crap you've tossed in there.
A bug report should factually describe a problem and the steps a dev can take to reproduce them.
Your frustration is a symptom of your own unmet expectations. The problem with _any_ expectation is that (being constant) it is bound to be unmet, eventually, given that the world is in a state of continuous change. So you can either lose your cool, or understand that this is the nature of the world, adapt and move on.
The title of this post has "click bait" plastered all over it, and that single post takes the whole thing out of context. I'm sorry I fell for it.
Google _all_ his bug reports and understand in the context.
" Frustration is an expression of emotion and has no place in a bug report."
Again, you're right, and again, you're wrong. Now we need moderators and rules and timeouts and bannination and more rules on how what as developers expect from bug reports?
It's hard enough for users to make bug reports.
What I want from bug reports is accuracy, precision, specification, and oh my god, a reproducible test case.
If after registering for a bug account, after taking the time to create a reproducible test case, after taking the time to enter that in my reporting system, if they want to call me a simian -- I'm okay with that.
I'm not suggesting rules/moderation/banning, but a little private introspection by individuals before they act.
Sure, he is submitting bug reports, but his childish behavior shouldn't have to be tolerated because of this.
It's hard to even see which part of 'Bugzilla Etiquette' this report violates:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html
If other reports are worse, that's another matter. But if so, it seems odd this relatively mild report would be the final trigger that brings down the banhammer. (If there's a reliable pattern of abuse, just wait for the next non-mild incident.)
BTW, a simple Bugzilla search for [Richard Mlynarik] returns "Zarro Boogs found". Similarly, a Google search for [site:bugzilla.mozilla.org Mlynarik simian] returns nothing.
I'm sure I'll find the right kind of search eventually – I did find a Mlynarik 'screw you' comment via Google – but if the action is justified by examples with exact quotes, you might as well supply links rather than leave many people searching.
And why personalize this by accusing me of "stepping up to defend a bully"? I've addressed the exact action and manner of action taken in the above-referenced report, with the caveat that other examples would change the analysis. I've defended the precise comment in the 'compact dialog' report, not the person's history.
It should have been clear from my conditionals ("If this report is representative…"; "If other reports are worse…") that I was curious about the alluded-to prior history, and my analysis was contingent upon the (at the time unlinked) specifics.
The concern I still have is that this latest comment was so mild and non-insulting that one possible interpretation is that the previous warning(s) were working. He depersonalized his criticisms into the zone where, if judged dispassionately, they could be more more helpful than hurtful.
Now, you've also been quoting other incidents ("simians", "die die die") that might be more recent and salient. I can't find the context for those. (Searches only turn up this thread.)
But I am only opining on the exact comments and actions referenced here. I'm not defending any particular person (who I don't know), but one most recent comment. And I'm not criticizing a general policy of exiling recidivist assholes, only the act of pulling the trigger after a comment that, standing alone, is innocuous.
If someone else over the years posted a thousand comments with the same level of sarcasm and exasperation, but also the same level of actual useful info (and no insults), as in Mlynarik's most recent comment, would they get a ban? Or even a warning? I suspect not. They'd just be considered a cranky but useful bug reporter.
Calling a developer a "simian" and shouting "screw you" and actually saying "You know, every time I see a comment from [a specific Thunderbird developer] I just want to reach out through the intertubes and cut off his damned fingers to prevent him ever writing any code" are all direct and personal attacks that should not be tolerated in any forum.
There's nothing "funny" about that. It's the behavior of a bully and someone who thinks that because he's big bad programmer with a long history that he can verbally abuse other programmers when ever he feels like it.
There's nothing funny about bullying.
Part of me wants to agree with you. Richard does "name names" and directly voice an opinion of another person's abilities and a judgement of their actions.
One of the comments in this HN thread reads: "Get off your high horse you fucking moron". That is abusive. Never mind that this comment is in response to someone I happen to disagree with.
On the other hand I did not find the "cutting off his fingers" comment abusive. It comes across an elaborate, possibly overwrought, way of saying "This guy is making me angry". It is OK in my book to give people feedback on how their actions are making you feel. The imagery is violent, the tone is not.
What I do find abusive is the phrase "people like you" which Richard uses in the same comment. So my considered opinion of these comments would be yes, they are somewhat abusive. But I would stop well short of "bullying".
Richard's attacks have a clear object-level target, which is not a person: he is clearly making legitimate (not necessarily true, but legitimate) claims about the TB development process - that it breaks features that worked, that the concerns of some users are being summarily dismissed, and that there is a pattern of these things happening over and over again.
Yes, the tone he uses for saying those things sometimes crosses a line. But on balance, the impression I'm taking away from this dispute is that Richard is being banned not so much for his tone, but more for saying things that are true and that the people wielding the power to censor him are unwilling to hear.
That aspect of the whole mess, the way the power asymmetry plays out, is what I suspect has people coming out in Richard's defense. People with ban buttons should usually err on the side of tolerance.
The success of open source rests on participation, and participation is a two-way street. When you open a bug reporting system, the intended message is "we care about your concerns". Marking a bug as "won't fix" sends the exact opposite message. That makes it, too, a power not to be used lightly: someone wielding that power indiscriminately can easily turn into what I'd not hesitate to call a "bully".
At some point these tensions stopped being about mere civility, and started being about the power politics of open source. At least, that's how it looks to this outside observer.
I'm saddened that you have this impression, given that most of the things he complains about are duplicates of bugs that other people were able to report in a civil manner. As a developer, I know my software has bugs, and am appreciative when users let me know what they are. As a person, I don't feel I should have to put up with sarcastic, snarky bullshit when finding out about the bugs, or when trying to fix them.
"The success of open source rests on participation, and participation is a two-way street."
I know of at least one Thunderbird developer who quit because the atmosphere in Bugzilla was hostile. I don't know how many people decided not to participate because of comments like Richard's. Participation isn't the same as welcoming everybody, no matter what their effect on the community.
Also, I would totally read a blog post about the power politics of open source. :)
edit: if I were dmose, I'd have banned him a year ago for https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579372#c2.
edit for your edit: Thanks for finding an earlier clearer example. That comment was unnecessarily personal and abusive. It deserved reprimand or censure. And if the reprimand(s) are responsible for the less-personal tone of the 2011-06-30 comment, compared to the 2010-07-21 comment, they're working to increase the signal-to-emotional-noise ratio. But the controversy of a hard ban for a lesser transgression now introduces new emotional noise.
So any open-source community would be better without them, eh?
How do you propose rehabilitating someone who has demonstrated no desire to be rehabilitated within this context?
Also, is it really the job of the developers to fix the bugs in a user rather than focus on the bugs in the product the user is using?
So the idea that he is rehabilitating, after warnings, is one interpretation of the linked reports.
Asa Dotzler has mentioned other quotes, but without dates/links for ontext. Perhaps they were in-person incidents? If so, that would change the calculus a lot (in favor of hair-trigger banning).
But part of a fair "next strike and you're gone" policy is being clear about what a 'strike' is. Was he warned not to use sarcasm, CAPS-YELLING, and excessive emotion? If so, he had fair warning. If instead he was warned not to be uncivil and insulting, then this latest comment didn't prove his incorrigibility.
No. This is an adult we are referring to here. We can reasonably expect that he knew exactly what he was doing, and was merely pushing the line as far as he could go, and just happened to cross it. This wasn't the first time; he was a repeated offender. This wasn't the start of the problem. It was the final straw (which, in my experience, is usually a minor straw when compared to the haystack beneath it).
Edit: Thank you for responding with a more clear comment than you original, btw. =)
Banning him now makes me think the developers of Thunderbird are ego maniacs.
Reports like this from my customers would be brilliant.
What Richard is doing here is investing his time into
making Mozilla better.
Instead, he vents his frustrations on bugzilla and generally acts like an ass.
I really don't like to play the "free" card. Too often developers say "well, it's open source so fix it or stop complaining." I don't think that's right at all . . . especially if you've advocated people use your software. However, having been involved with a lot of OSS projects, I can say that the bugs that get fixed the fastest are the ones that affect the developers themselves. Anything that gets fixed above and beyond that is a developer being a nice person in volunteering his time to help someone else. More to the point: it's hard to get people to work for free when they're demoralized and bug reports like this are demoralizing. If I were involved with the project, he's about the absolute last person I'd try to please no matter how right he may be.
So, while I'm neutral on the ban, the bug reporter has to realize this is a very ineffective way to win friends and get his issues resolved.
We're very fortunate at Mozilla to have tens of thousands of but reporters who aren't bullies and who don't think because they wrote some GNU code once that they can threaten you and deride you. This means that the cost of kicking out the bullies is either trivial, or a net win.
And I am..er... WAS a hard core FireFox user (switched to chrome a year ago) and still am a heavy Thunderbird user. Mozilla needs to haul ass.
Only if each Richard Mlynarik they have increases the quality of the product. Do you have any reason to think it does? This particular Richard Mlynarik wasn't writing code for Firefox or Thunderbird (which is too bad because i hear he's an excellent hacker). He was submitting bug reports, most of them allegedly duplicates, full of inflammatory language.
If you believe that bug reports filled with inflammatory language make a project work better than bug reports without it, then do please present your evidence for that. My own guess is that being rude to people may be effective in getting them to pay attention in the short term to your needs or wants rather than someone else's, but that it doesn't do anything to improve their overall productivity and may well make it worse by reducing their motivation.
Emotion 101: When people are pissed they curse. I agree with you, it would be beneficial for them not to but they do. I have a feeling a lot of the people who don't tolerate his language have never worked in customer service or with the public. Emotion happens, a LOT, learn to ignore it. Don't want to deal with it? Write a greasemonkey script that changes all the language you don't like into encouraging statements.
All the programmers I know are very logical, stable people and it seems as a whole they're not used to erratic emotional behavior that people in customer service are used to seeing.
I used to work as customer service for a website and would constantly get sarcastic help requests. It made me hate them and I certainly didn't want to help them. In fact, I either ignored the ticket or just responded slowly as I handled tickets with more reasonable people.
The people saying this is a "great" ticket and wish more reports were given this way are full of it. You will very quickly get tired of it because you realize you are doing everything you can to help them and they really don't care enough to give you enough respect to speak with you as a human being in a conversation. Instead choosing to be sarcastic and insult your efforts to help.
I see this the other way around. I am thankful a huge bunch of volunteers spend many hours of their day creating software I use daily without having to pay for it. They don't deserve to be treated like this.
If your critics give up on you and stop telling you how much you suck and how much they hate you, that's a very bad place to be in.
But if he writes me a letter letting me know that I suck and that I should rather die than writing buggy code making millions of lives miserable everyday, I'd be fine.
He didn't throw stones at Mozilla labs, he filed and commented on a bug report. Its just text, not a man in their office. Virtual != Real.
Its a mind over matter issue. And as Twain would agree..if you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
People are routinely arrested and convicted for basically the same type of behavior directed at public officials spawned from aggravations and frustrations of similar sources..."bugs" in laws, perceived unfairness, disagreements on important decisions, racism, xenophobia, etc, etc, etc (I suspect enforcement is greater in this situation because public officials tend to know the law and exercise their rights against this behavior more often).
And I'm arguing that what's reasonable in the physical world, kicking people out who are abusive, is reasonable in our online meeting places like Bugzilla.
I may not personally mind, but I'm not easily bullied. I've got a pretty thick skin too. But that should not be a requirement for participating in our project.
In fact, this kind of irritating software behavior is one of the reasons I ditched TB a long time ago. I'm sure that was considerable less useful than actually filing a mildly offensive bug report.
Just as there exists a certain kind of customer who increases the difficulty in running a business, so too there exists a certain kind of user who increases the difficulty in running an open source project. The project as a whole will be much healthier in the long run with the small percentage of users who generate the largest amount of grief removed from the equation.
Richard is deliberately making things difficult for Firefox. It doesn't matter that he's "taking the time to highlight a bug". It doesn't matter what his street cred is. He's behaving like a spoiled child throwing a tantrum. If he started stomping his feet and screaming at someone in my house for serving the potatoes too soft, I'd throw him out.
For reference (firing your customer): http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/04/the_customer...
Mozilla would hate to have Linus Torvalds as a contributor.
That does not deserve a ban in and of itself. Repeated instances of that following warnings of unacceptable behavior, on the other hand, does.
It would seem Richard here was in the second situation:
> You've been warned repeatedly about the Bugzilla Etiquette rules, and you're still failing to respect them.
I don't mind the downvotes, but could you add why you disagree?
I fully sympathize with that Richard guy, and share his discontent at this serious issue happening in too many open source projects: the "community before quality" meme. Some people just don't understand that without quality the project will just die. Slowly but surely. Some other people seem to just want to see their name in the credits, even if they essentially screw the project in the process. Screw them, if that's what they think.
Did anybody notice that the bug had been clinging there for +15 months and it had 12 duplicates submitted by users and there were being ignored???
Also, as an experienced developer I can't figure a reasonable justification to the injection of such bug in the first place, specially when a beta-tester reported it in due time. Breaking the behavior of Ctrl-F is an awesomely visible and annoying bug!!!
Regarding the insults, well, when you know that nothing will be done to improve things and you are essentially wasting your time there, you don't f*ing care about being banned.
As in the present case, people argued that for Eric to continue his abuse would harm Lisp by driving away contributors and adoptees. Difference is that it was very difficult to ban someone from a newsgroup, and Eric never was.
This guy who's getting / who got banned deserved it, but the changes they keep making aren't all that good.
Firefox is eating a lot of memory, Thunderbird does odd things at times.
A friend has 500 corporate workstations which are running Firefox 3.6.x and Thunderbird 3.1.x. Will he upgrade them to the newer versions, in which they keep pouring poorly tested code? No, he will switch to something else.
So if a company wouldn't do it for money, why would someone take that abuse for free?
They wouldn't. And they didn't.
It boils down to:
> You've been warned repeatedly about the Bugzilla Etiquette rules, and you're still failing to respect them.