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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

I honestly don't get why he gets angry. The project doesn't have a mailing list and the explanations on the readme are not that clear either. The user knew that issues are the wrong place to ask questions like that and asked for a better place.

Rob is making confusing comments himself: "Massive is pretty much "done" although a few things come in from time to time", but then "End of life. I think I said it's finished - meaning done". EOL and complete/stable are not the same thing.

Sure, some of the questions may be silly, but it's nothing huge to complain about. If you end up telling your users "Please - use something else and don't come back." you're the problem. The response could've been "I will not spend more time documenting this project or answering questions about it, there is no mailing list. Closing issue." and everyone could be so much more happy at the end.

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  > If you end up telling your users "Please - use something 
  > else and don't come back." you're the problem.

Sometimes, removing toxic community members is a very positive thing to do for a community. When toxic members are tolerated, they have the effect of driving away the positive contributors.

The trolling asked for LINQ, !dynamics, and !single_file_database. Given that C#/.NET is moving away from LINQ as the goto abstraction over databases, it's hard to see a person requring those things ever using Massive in the first place.

Of course the idea that there is no mailing list for Massive where this sort of internet banter can occur...well that's exactly why there is no mailing list.

> Given that C#/.NET is moving away from LINQ as the goto abstraction over databases

What would you say they're moving towards? I have to shamefully admit that I never learned LINQ, preferring to write and use raw SQL(which can be unwieldy if you're dealing with the type of database that could really use an ORM), but I didn't know there was something else that trumps LINQ?

.net is moving away from LINQ? Where is that and how did I miss this? Do you have a link?

That seems totally insane.

> If you end up telling your users "Please - use something else and don't come back." you're the problem.

haha seriously? He's the "problem"? What problem? He is the author and owner of the repo in question, and he can do pretty much whatever the hell he wants within that repo. The other guy is entitled to exactly on extra large serving of "nothing whatsoever".

If you have some freeloading, non contributing imbecile that randomly stops by to tell you how you did it all wrong, and when are you going to make it so that it is more to this guys liking, the only problem I see is the random twat.

The End of Life comment was quoting the person who opened the bug.

Rob said 'done', the commenter interpreted this as 'end of life', which is both clueless (in that way that corporate-worldview meets actual programmer can be) and borderline insulting.

"End of life. I think I said it's finished - meaning done". EOL and complete/stable are not the same thing.

Well, quite, as the entire conversation makes very clear. Rob doesn't say it was end of life, he said it was finished. He says "End of life." at the beginning of the para here to headline this part of his reply.

"If you end up telling your users "Please - use something else and don't come back." you're the problem."

He's not telling his users to get lost. His users are very happy and have used this project for ages and at massive scale because it's stable and it works. He's telling one particular user to get lost, a user that doesn't even understand how github works.

Communicating by text is hard. If you're not explicit, people could read something different than you intended - I read the last quote as saying project is EOL. The quoting is not obvious.

I stand by my opinion though. If you tell this to any single user, you're just being a mean person for no reason and you are the reason they are unlikely to understand what the issue is about. Maybe that user just read the message and wrote to people he knows "I'm never using opensource projects from github, and this maintainer is the reason." - how does that situation improve in the community?

Rob could end it in so many different ways that would be less aggressive. He didn't even say "learn how github/FOSS works and then check the project again", just "don't come back". It sounds like it's us-vs-them and "they" cannot be expected to learn and improve.

I've seen the entitlement Rob has seen, and to be frank, I see it a little bit in your messages to.

Rob doesn't owe this user anything. Nothing. Not even a reply.

He's being nice by responding at all. The passive-aggressive undertone to the user's questions - trying to evaluate the project to use it, and freeload on Rob's work, rather than take it as a starting point for further customization and personal stewardship, while criticizing things like performance before he's measured anything - this is pretty hard to swallow.

Rob may have responded to the cluelessness a little harshly, but it's hard to hold everything back when you're in a conversation with someone like this. And I don't blame him, because like I said, the guy wasn't owed anything.

Users like this aren't the "customers" for a piece of code like this. This is a seed file that you hack and customize for your purposes; it's not a library that you simply link in, or pull from upstream on a regular basis. The right thing to say to a user like this is: go away; this is not for you.

> the passive-aggressive undertone

The what?

The bugfiler was engaged in trolling behavior. There's no upside to treating it as anything else.

It's clear that, either:

   Massive is not the right tool for the bugfiler's workflow.

   The bugfiler's purpose is to engage in an Internet debate.

Neither is productive for anyone beyond entertainmemnt. Conrey covered both cases with reasonable aplomb, even if the long term reaction is a bit overboard.

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So this is a different project where he has made a lot of suggestions and has contributed code that adds features.

Was there a particular reason you linked this?

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