Engineer_comp_geek just gave someone a warning about “attacking the staff” to someone criticizing a feature of Discourse. So which one of you staff members was it?
Obviously this is a rhetorical question. Why don’t you ask what you really want to ask?
If it is an obvious rhetorical question, shouldn’t the real question be obvious?
Why play games? You’re expecting an answer from a group of volunteers and you’re being disrespectful.
I’m not sure how much of the code that runs the place the poster in question is responsible for. IIRC, the poster continued to help with troubleshooting/fixing things, but made themself scarce due to people getting crappy to the poster in question.
IIRC
Okay, I won’t play games. If you want it phrased as a question, then I guess the question should be “Are the authors of the software this site runs on a protected class we aren’t allowed to criticize?” But the post was more of a comment than a statement–ecg appears to have had no understanding whatsoever of the post he cavilerly tossed a warning at.
The author of the software is @codinghorror but you knew this. He is apparently considered to be Staff.
Is the whole of Discourse a single-person project? And since when is he staff?
It’s just a guess, but I think ecg included the developers of the board software when talking about the staff, and that’s fair because I also thought that comment was disrespectful and the warning was just.
Discourse is a commercial package used by hundreds or thousands of sites, not custom software written for this site. Being slapped down for insulting a Discourse author is like slapping down a person who insulted Linus Torvalds if the hosting servers run on Linux.
Just checked. He is “Discourse Staff”, not SDMB staff, his account has been removed so he is no longer a member, and his last post was in 2022.
Do you think the warning was unjustified, or are you just upset that ECG was not specific about SMDB vs Discourse staff?
I don’t see what’s wrong. Jeff Atwood is not SDMB staff and for over 2 years has not been an SDMB member. He is therefore on the level of celebrities/politicians. Calling suchlike arrogant sods has always been OK out of the Pit.
No, in my view that’s an inappropriate analogy. It’s actually more like being slapped down for insulting the owner/operator of the servers with whom your organization has a business relationship.
As a purely practical matter, gratuitous insults are detrimental to a productive and collaborative business partnership. As a social matter, such insults are just simply counterproductive to congenial discussions.
We can and we do criticize certain elements of Discourse, but there’s no need to be insulting when we do it. Antagonizing the people tasked with supporting us is no way to improve this business partnership.
I’m not sure if this particular insult rose to the level of deserving a formal warning, but that’s a different question.
I think that not only was the warning unjustified, but absolutely downright Orwellian.
1 He didn’t call out anyone by name, just said a general “person who wrote this software”.
2 There have been many complaints about how Discourse (and by extension the writers of Discourse) acts as nanny software making your decisions for you and how the writers simply don’t care to fix mistakes. They haven’t been given warnings before.
3 Being restrained from insulting the writers of a commercial software package because that software package is used here is a Really Bad Look.
Yes, it is something like that. You apparently think that isn’t extremely bad, I do. Let’s say that the company that publishes the magazine that owns this site was bought out by Rupert Murdock. Do you think that it would then be okay to make it a warnable offense for anyone here to insult Rupert Murdock? Because I don’t.
Yes, the Discourse design is heavily weighted by certain assumptions about the competence and culture of the user base which are inappropriate for the SDMB. Those have mostly been remedied anyway by changing a lot of default settings, but in any case as I implied above, constructive criticism is justified, but random insults are not.
That’s a really bizarre statement. Being restrained from criticizing some aspect of the software design would be a bad look. Being restrained from hurling invectives at the authors, with whom we have an ongoing partnership, is perfectly appropriate.
I have no strong opinion on whether the insult rose to the level of deserving a formal warning, but the action was hardly “Orwellian”.
You’re off creating an inappropriate straw man again.
Thank you. The thread would have been well-served by leading with this instead of dancing around the issue.
The tread title was sarcastic because I already knew which SDMB staff members were responsible for writing Discourse: none of them. If it is now banned to insult the hosting software or its authors, then that needs to be added to the increasingly long list of official rules
Seriously.
The sarcasm came across as petulant and juvenile.