From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2011-06-12T10:00:51+09:00
Subject: Re: PSA: Ilias is Crazy

On Saturday, June 11, 2011 05:55:20 PM Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 07:39:12AM +0900, David Masover wrote:
> > I wouldn't judge someone for, say, top-posting, like you did here. But if
> > I pointed out that you really shouldn't top-post, and you should quote
> > the relevant parts rather than the entire email, I would hope you
> > wouldn't respond with "Quit being so unprofessional! It's my right to
> > top-post! Anyone should be able to see in five minutes that top-posting
> > is correct! If you tell me again, I'll sue!"
> 
> It occurs to me his "take action" might involve reporting people to ISPs
> for disagreeing with him, or something asinine like that.

That's not reasonable. He almost always says this immediately after citing 
(and sometimes linking to) defamation laws. As poor as his communication 
skills may be, I find it hard to believe that he didn't at least intend to 
give the impression of a legal threat, which is functionally equivalent to 
actually delivering a legal threat.

So, his comments about "taking action" are duck-typed as legal threats.

> > But he's far from harmless. We're spending our time and energy dealing
> > with him, instead of people who actually have real problems and are
> > willing to work with us to solve them.
[...]
> I think the bigger danger than being too busy to help someone is someone
> saying "Wow, a troll is running this mailing list.  I won't even ask."

That's a good point.

Of course, we also have to balance it against the impression that trolling is 
tolerated. Worse, it's not obvious to an outsider that Ilias' blockers are 
not, in fact, serious problems with Ruby (especially bad if the entire 
community ignores serious blockers), but are a result of his own possibly-
deliberate misunderstanding.

I'm not sure what the balance is here. I'm starting to see the case for 
ignoring him until he goes away.