Gnome devs ban Bugzilla user for complaining on separate website | Hacker News Reader

Gnome devs ban Bugzilla user for complaining on separate website

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38 pointskintamanimatt17 comments

The title should really read "GNOME dev bans bugzilla user for drawing attention to bad GNOME developer processes"

This is a silly controversy that keeps getting taken out of context. A bug tracker is not a forum to discuss the direction of a project; there's other avenues for that (blog posts, etc...). Spam posting the link to the bug report to all the social media sites you can think of is anti-social behavior, and is indeed worthy of a ban of your bugzilla account.

Yes, the GNOME dev that closed the bug with a blunt "No." response was rude, but that doesn't give you the moral authority to rally the outrage police and incite Internet riots.

Really? So you'd prefer if the discussion was spread amongst n blogs as opposed to kept in one place? And in a way it is a bug since it introduces a regression. Also how is linking to it anti-social behavior?

If that one place is a bug tracker, then, yes. It's anti-social because the intent of linking to it directly was meant to encourage a response from the Internet. Hell, if some context was provided, and then it was linked to, that'd be a different matter. But linking to it directly with context was clearly meant to illicit a reactionary public response.

A bug tracker is not a forum for public debate over a feature. All those responses go into a lot of people's email boxes. It's annoying to get all those email where every other person is a new poster looking to add their two cents, and I'd dare suggest that anyways thinks otherwise isn't on a mailing list or on the receiving end of bug reports.

I'll have to disagree on this one. In my opinion, bug trackers an excellent way to organize feature discussions. Sure, blogs posts are a more expressive medium but that doesn't reduce the importance of bug trackers.

In this particular instance, the GNOME dev was pretty rude and if that behavior is supported by the GNOME community, it needs to be publicly called out.

I as a user would not want to support any open source project where developers act like asshats.

It was rude, I'll give you that, although I'd take an issue that this is normal behavior in the community. I've interacted with a lot of GNOME devs, hell, a lot of developers in general. Some are rude, some are short, yes, but the overwhelmingly majority are nice, pleasant people. But even then, languages barriers pop up, miscommunication happens, or yes, otherwise decent people lose their patience and say something rude.

I'd still argue that this this one bug report being taken out of context to illicit a reactionary response. Don't get me wrong, there's room for debate about the transparency feature, but let's stop convicting the entire project for one dev and one bug report.

> rally the outrage police and incite Internet riots

Wait -- how was this done, exactly? Are you referring to the HN post? Because, unless the title was changed, it was simply a statement of fact.

The real problem seems to be that some Gnome dev thinks they can be rude and expect zero backlash.

The title hasn't been changed since I posted it.

He's talking about the post from yesterday which linked to the bugtracker.

Oh. On a side note, it's funny this got flagged to death within minutes of reaching the front page!

What are you suggesting?

Yes, that's what I'm talking about, as well as all the posts on Reddit that link directly to the bug report without any context being provided.

Right. But, does that then also entitle people who only saw this bug report through social media (mostly Reddit) to make accounts so that they can make posts on the bug report like:

> And this is why people don't use GNOME. What a joke.

> where is christian persch hiding now?

> Time to move to KDE or XFCE

Keep in mind this is a bugtracker, which is used for technical discussions for devs and users, not a forum for people to express their opinions about how terrible GNOME is.

I don't think people need any kind of entitlement to say things on the internet. It's kinda what we do here.

Really? Do you have a website? Can I make a hyperbolic post on it about you terrible you are? You won't remove it?

I'm not following your logic.

I can tell. Let's lay it out:

I said, (paraphrasing here), "yes, the GNOME dev was rude, but posting the link to the bug report on a bunch of social media sites without context was intended to illicit a reactionary response from the Internet, and a bug report is not the proper place for that response."

The, you said, "The real problem seems to be that some Gnome dev thinks they can be rude and expect zero backlash."

I replied, "The real problem seems to be that some Gnome dev thinks they can be rude and expect zero backlash."

I agree with you on that point, but still raised an objection to the fact that a direct link was posted everywhere to the bug report: "[...] does that then also entitle people who only saw this bug report through social media (mostly Reddit) to make accounts so that they can make [malicious] posts on the bug report [...]". I again pointed out the fact that this was a bugtracker.

You then said, "I don't think people need any kind of entitlement to say things on the internet. It's kinda what we do here."

That's the issue though; the GNOME has a code of conduct (https://live.gnome.org/CodeOfConduct/) and they're clearly allowed to enforce it and regulate speech on their website. It's a website that intended for technical discussions between developers and testers. And that's the controversy, right? That GNOME banned someone's bugzilla account by spam posting the link to the bug report to a bunch of social media sites, even after they were warned about that behavior. It's their website, and they have a clear code of conduct, intended to prevent the exact sort of thing that happened (the posting of those malicious posts I pointed to earlier). GNOME is just enacting their 1st Amendment right to maintain order in a bugtracker.

So, yeah, you can say what you want on the Internet. That doesn't mean you're immune from repercussions either. So, sure, you can spam post a link to a bug report, out of context, in an attempt to gather collective outrage, but GNOME or anyone else for that matter has just as much right to enact their 1st Amendment rights by banning your account for anti-social behavior.

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