[ILUG-Social] Re: [ILUG] Mother and Father.

[Rick Moen]

[Moved from ilug@ to social@, for reasons obvious from other parts of
the silly flamewar in question.]

Quoting Gary Coady (gary at netsoc.tcd.ie):

> Apologies and thanks to Eric S. Raymond - the following is an extract from
> http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
> 
> 
> Odds are you'll screw up a few times on hacker community forums - in ways
> detailed in this article, or similar. And you'll be told exactly how you
> screwed up, possibly with colourful asides. In public.
> 
> When this happens, the worst thing you can do is whine about the experience,
> claim to have been verbally assaulted, demand apologies, scream, hold your
> breath, threaten lawsuits, complain to people's employers, leave the toilet
> seat up, etc. Instead, here's what you do:
> 
> Get over it. It's normal. In fact, it's healthy and appropriate.
> 
> Community standards do not maintain themselves: They're maintained by people
> actively applying them, visibly, in public. Don't whine that all criticism
> should have been conveyed via private mail: That's not how it works. Nor is
> it useful to insist you've been personally insulted when someone comments
> that one of your claims was wrong, or that his views differ. Those are loser
> attitudes.
> 
> There have been hacker forums where, out of some misguided sense of
> hyper-courtesy, participants are banned from posting any fault-finding with
> another's posts, and told "Don't say anything if you're unwilling to help
> the user." The resulting departure of clueful participants to elsewhere
> causes them to descend into meaningless babble and become useless as
> technical forums.
> 
> Exaggeratedly "friendly" (in that fashion) or useful: Pick one.
> 
> Remember: When that hacker tells you that you've screwed up, and (no matter
> how gruffly) tells you not to do it again, he's acting out of concern for
> (1) you and (2) his community. It would be much easier for him to ignore you
> and filter you out of his life. If you can't manage to be grateful, at least
> have a little dignity, don't whine, and don't expect to be treated like a
> fragile doll just because you're a newcomer with a theatrically
> hypersensitive soul and delusions of entitlement.

Just a brief note:  I was the actual author of every word of the above
essay excerpt (among other parts of the essay) -- for better or worse.
I'm not saying it's great prose, just that it's absolutely unmistakeably
_my_ writing style, and not Eric's.  Which makes it a bit jarring every
time I see it attributed to ESR.  (Not your fault.)

Eric hasn't yet inserted the credit necessary to fix this misperception,
which is a shame.  I hope he eventually gets around to doing so.

-- 
Cheers,            There are only 10 types of people in this world -- 
Rick Moen          those who understand binary arithmetic and those who don't.
rick at linuxmafia.com