From: Ryan Davis Date: 2011-06-12T05:04:08+09:00 Subject: Re: PSA: Ilias is Crazy On Jun 10, 2011, at 18:48 , Christopher Dicely wrote: > On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 11:41 AM, Ryan Davis wrote: > >> Again, this man is insane, so please, please, please refrain >> from replying to his posts, or in threads he starts. > > Apparently, his insanity (which I don't dispute) has resulted in some > legitimate improvements that have been accepted for Ruby 1.9.3, so I'm > not convinced that engaging him is without utility. His pedantic OCD has pointed out some stale data on the bugtracker that's been stale for a long time without complaint. Verdict: inconsequential. He pointed out that we didn't support a decrepit unicode-incompatible windows codepage for greek. Verdict: inconsequential. He pointed out a bug in syck... something nobody actually maintains. Psych was made the default engine for 1.9.3... I don't think we've looked into the potential consequences for this enough (I've had to make changes to rubygems to get it to work properly with psych... I'm sure there are others). Verdict: no clue. All in all, I think his positive contributions do very little to pay off the amount of negative consequences he brings to the table. One of the reasons why MINSWAN works is by shaping our community. For example, we actively ban trolls in IRC to maintain the culture we want to have. We don't have such controls in this medium as it is a mailing-list bridged to both usenet and a web forum. This is why I suggest shunning instead. It works... but only if we work together to make it work. This is why it worked for comp.lang.lisp. They were smaller and it was easier for them to actively shun Ilias until he went away. What we're dealing with here is the Pareto Principal. >90% of the noise (and trolling) is coming from <10% of the people. If we control them, we control the noise. The signal cleans up drastically after that. MINSWAN doesn't mean blindly accepting every asshole who comes along. For some people, rationality and polite requests to change behavior just never work. For them, we should shun.