Brett Cannon (@brettcannon), in post 24:

I’m going to leave this post up, but the PSF CoC does ask folks to be “ open, considerate, and respectful.” I personally think that sentence is not being “considerate” or “respectful”. Nor is that statement a fact in spite of its phrasing based on the private feedback the moderators have received about how we have handled the various threads in question

Indeed, no, it’s not a fact. Of course it’s an opinion, by its construction. And it happens to be one which dissents from those in the private feedback you cite. (And which also dissents, for example, from the first couple of replies in the prior thread.)

But if this crosses a line, that’s seriously problematic. This makes it far harder to register an actual complaint that has any actual weight behind it. It takes many more words to explain what “abysmal behavior” looks like than to register that opinion. But praise is easy, and nearly always falls on the good side of any CoC.

I understand that it’s nice to be able to have constructive criticism. But nobody is entitled to be shielded from the disapproval of others.

Besides, a CoC which claims to establish such protection is one that is bound to be applied unevenly. And in fact we have already seen this for years. Where was the moderation when it was Jack Diederich being attacked? In my quite humble opinion, the criticisms levied there went far beyond simply using phrases like “frankly abysmal behavior”, which can only ever be understood as an opinion. Bluntly, they insinuated serious charges that in my mind amount to outright defamation of character.

Brett Cannon (@brettcannon), in post 24:

I believe someone is inferring. I’m personally not aware of any list of people to act against that’s waiting in the wings (but this is off-topic for this thread).

Yes, someone is inferring. Rather, many people are inferring, including myself.

We don’t know.

Because of the lack of openness.

Which you are apparently not actually in a position to counteract - because you can only tell us what you’re personally aware of.

I assume you also can neither confirm nor deny whether you are a member of the CoC WG.

Brett Cannon (@brettcannon), in post 24:

Even some people who have participated for a long time have an off day and stray from being cordial.

Sure. Let me take a few moments to give my own take on “abysmal behaviour”1, from personal experience.

I still remember when I was suspended because I went too many posts in a row asking beginners to actually narrow the problem down to code that others could use to reproduce the problem in a way that the mods felt was too brusque, applied the Socratic method (which apparently nobody likes despite how effective it is for those with an open mind) without adequate meta explanation, etc. (And then I disregarded feedback on this because I genuinely believed I had already incorporated it, but the mods disagreed.)

When that happened, I had a slow-motion back and forth discussion about the topic. I was not given any clarity on how to phrase things better, despite explicitly asking for such. Until I came to my own conclusions about that, explicitly said described what I planned to do, and explicitly asked for the suspension to be lifted (stating a specific reason why I would like to be able to post again), I was not given any clarity on the duration of the suspension. In fact, even then it was some number of days until the suspension was lifted, and I forget that number, because I got no feedback aside from the suspension actually being lifted.

In that exchange, it was suggested to me that I should make sure not to treat this site like Stack Overflow. First of all, that completely misunderstands what using Stack Overflow is actually like2, but also I haven’t written answers there for quite some time now. I stayed here specifically so that I could answer questions that are appropriate for a forum environment (Stack Overflow is explicitly not one).

But the reason I bring that up is: on Stack Overflow, when you get suspended, the system automatically tells you the duration of the suspension. And for first offenses the standard duration is 48 hours.

Openness is indeed severely lacking.

Brett Cannon (@brettcannon), in post 24:

This is actually a key reason I personally argued we move away from mailing lists as it leaves “bad” posts in everyone’s inbox and online forever.

If posts can be undeleted, that demonstrates that they are not purged from the Discourse database.

Everyone who uses a mail client has the freedom to delete local caches of messages. Nobody is compelled to read through mailing list archives and look for offensive content. (If anything, that’s the behaviour of someone with an axe to grind.)

Moderators can’t be everywhere and in most cases they will only be aware of something offensive because it was flagged. Nobody prevented the user who flagged it, from seeing it.

I don’t mean to argue for going back to mailing lists - just that these supposed advantages are missing the point, and imagining an additional protection that isn’t really there.

Brett Cannon (@brettcannon), in post 24:

I read the post and in fact agreed it was off-topic, but since it was a “thanks” post and the rest of the post seemed unlikely to trigger more off-topic posts

If I flagged everything I saw around here that I felt was “off-topic” relative to the OP, I would probably spend more time doing that than writing replies. (And I put a lot of thought into my average reply here.)

Selectively flagging posts as off-topic is definitely something that can be weaponized.

Tim Peters (@tim.one), in post 31:

I spent some hours digging through the Discourse docs a few weeks back, and there is no complete understanding to be had. I expect you’d have to stare at the source code to suss out the real meaning of many ill-defined aspects of the docs.

Just FWIW, there is a Meta Discourse for talking about the software itself.

Jean Abou Samra (@jeanas), in post 32:

I wouldn’t blame Discourse the technical platform here; the defaults are probably tailored for large communities with many one-off posters

To be fair, the #users section is pretty much like that from what I’ve seen.

  1. With a u, because I’m Canadian (and I assume David Mertz is not). ↩

  2. The comment section on Stack Overflow is not for discussion, and you aren’t intended to go back and forth with the OP, except as needed to fix issues with the question. The question is expected to meet a list of standards, and having a proper MRE or specification is only one of those. Those standards exist because fundamentally, the question is not about helping the OP fix something, but contributing to a reusable Q&A library. Other Q&A sites, such as Codidact, are really intended to work the same way - although sites about less technical topics often take those standards less seriously. ↩