#winehq admin abuse

[Kai Blin]

On Thursday 16 August 2007 20:27:04 Jonathan Challinger wrote:

Jonathan,

without wanting to give the impression that you posted on this list and now 
everybody is ganging up on you, I do have a couple of comments here.

> Jan Zerebecki, I'd be happy to help, but how? I could develop some
> guidelines and rules for admins to follow, but then what? How would they be
> enforced? I have no authority to put such things in place. Its not the
> writing rules that's hard, its the enforcing them. Here: i'll write them
> now:
> Either participate politely or don't participate at all
> Break up flamewars, don't start them.

I completely agree for mailing lists. But this doesn't really map well to IRC. 
Communication is much less precise and faster in chat. I don't have a good 
solution. Does someone have a good set of explicit rules that work for IRC?

> There needs to be some kind of structure, though. Presumably, unless he's
> the project leader, there's someone who can take away his admin privileges.
> There should be guidelines for how admins behave, and admins who don't
> behave according to said guidelines should have their admin privileges
> suspended or removed.

That's not the way it works, though. There need to be people willing to do 
this job. If you have a large number to pick from, you can be picky. Vitaliy 
devotes a lot of time to helping people in #winehq, even though I agree he is 
a bit rude from time to time. Still, you will find that he's really helpful 
if you ask "smart questions", as esr defines them.

>
> Tom Wickline, I am Pie-rate, not carretto. I still don't agree with how he
> handled carretto. Maybe the community should try appointing admins based on
> people skills, not coding skills?

Agreed. Ideally the developers should do as little user support as possible to 
be able to spend more time developing. However, most wine users only come 
into #winehq to bitch about some programs not working and to ask for help. 
Again, if more people in there were actually active helping people, someone 
would have said something else than "oh well", and don't tell me you'd just 
have ignored the "oh well" in that case.

Of course building a good community is important, and I think your email 
scratches the surface of the problem Wine as a project has with it's 
community. But that's material for a different thread.

> The problem here is I asked a question in a help channel, not to him
> specifically, but he answered it just to state that he doesn't care. He
> then banned me for voicing concern over whether he should be doing such
> things.

Ok, if you don't mind I'll dissect the question a little.

[some formatting added for better readability]

<Pie-rate>: my brother's girlfriend's WoW install is
crashing (locking up, stops responding) randomly.

Here, you describe the problem you're seeing. So far, so good.

<Pie-rate>: she will install windows tomorrow if it doesn't get fixed. i don't 
like windows and i don't want to deal with it.

Here, you're trying to to stress how important your problem is. While this 
might be important for you, it is not for me, and I doubt it is for lots of 
other Wine developers. I don't work on Wine because I want to make more 
people switch to Linux. I stopped caring what operating system people use 
about six years ago, as long as they don't mind what OS I use. 

Frankly, I started working on Wine because I was paid to work on it, and while 
I'm not paid anymore, I like the challenge of working on problems like 
figuring out how Windows ticks and to make Wine tick the same way.

But back to the analysis.

<Pie-rate>: the message it crashes with is: 
err:ntdll:RtlpWaitForCriticalSection section 0x509da8c "?" wait timed out in 
thread 0047, blocked by 003e, retrying (60 sec)

This is not really helpful, but arguably that's a bit hard to tell without 
knowing Wine. So I'd say this one is fine.

<Pie-rate>: this is with an install copied over from my
computer, which i KNOW works flawlessly, and wine 0.9.41

If I'd do that on Windows, it'd break for a lot of apps. Why people think Wine 
is different is beyond me. As Juan said in his email. the FAQ clearly states 
not to do that.

> Civility is important to a degree in the freenode channels, but swearing
> like a sailor while banning people who complain about it is just
> ridiculous. As an admin, you should be helping politely or not helping at
> all, and breaking up flamewars, not starting them.

I still fail to see how this is connected to being an op or not. This should 
be a general rule.

Anyway, looking at my experience with Open Source help channels, you're 
basically always expected to have read the FAQ before asking questions if you 
want someone to help you. You actually didn't ask a question and you stated 
that you hadn't read the FAQ. So I think an "oh well" response, while 
certainly not ideal, was well justified.

I agree with you that banning people who disagree is bad style. Personally, 
I'd probably just ignore the whole thing. But starting the conversation in 
a "I'm a paying customer, and if people don't do what I want, I'll spend my 
money elsewhere" style message certainly doesn't help. We do get that a lot, 
and having done support in a volunteer organization myself, I know this gets 
on your nerves quite quickly.

Anyway, I don't want to single you out for being the bad guy, I just wanted to 
explain a little why the echo you got here was the way it is.

Oh, one other thing. It's a bit rude to take a personal email back to a public 
list without consent of the poster, especially if the poster stated that he 
didn't want the email to go to said list. Also, top-posting is against common 
mailing list etiquette.

Cheers,
Kai

-- 
Kai Blin
WorldForge developer  http://www.worldforge.org/
Wine developer        http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin
Samba team member     http://www.samba.org/samba/team/
--
Will code for cotton.
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