To think cb88 has taken a higher rank of irritation than ME?!? T’was I who INVENTED “The Luposian Bug”! T’was I who was quite literally called “Batshit Crazy”! Have I not been trying HARD enough to maintain these titles of adoration? I guess old age IS catching up to me… darn it!
But, seriously, if someone contributes NOTHING but complaining, offers no ideas/input, and seeks to only belittle developers for the effort they put forth, I think “sequestering” is in order. Put them in their own little corner and limit their ability to interact with others, til they have learned their lesson.
Now that it has been taken out of context, maybe not so.
But let’s look again at what happened in the original topic:
Someone is working on porting the Ladybird browser
The Ladybird browser announces that they are splitting off from Serenity and going to use more 3rd party libraries
There are some build errors related to ICU
Someone else intervenes and says “ICU is bloated and should not be used, there are libraries to do the same thing that are 60x smaller”
This manages to be problematic on several levels
It is inaccurate: the linked libraries (after asking) which are 60x smaller don’t do nearly as much things as ICU does
It is irrelevant: ICU being already included in Haiku anyways, using it in Ladybird has a cost of 0 extra bytes. You can’t beat that
It is distracting: for a while, people have been repeating well-known points about ICU (that there is some room for optimizations, that Begasus is already working on bringing us back to only two versions of it (gcc2/gcc13) in haikuports instead of several more intermediate ones, etc), and two weeks later this is still ongoing.
Anyway, as Axel already says in his initial post, a ban may be excessive. That’s why he started a topic to talk about it in public, and not a vote or a private moderator discussion. It is a way to have a higher level discussion about the moderation policies, what behavior is appropriate or not in this forum, and what actions we can take. Usually there won’t be a permanent ban before a warning (I think we can consider this topic as a warning and then a temporary suspension if the user continues behaving in the same way.
There can also be a discussion about how we handle this. I have tried to bring back things into technical discussions, but this leads to derailing threads into offtopic discussions, so maybe I shouldn’t do that and instead we should point out when the tone in a reply is inappropriate and it’s not helpful in a discussion.
I refuse to see this thread as some kind of “people’s court”, I guess this was not @axeld’s intention, even though at first glance it may look like that. I will, however, avoid expressing any personal opinions regarding @cb88’s posts, because I don’t want to heat up a somewhat uncomfortable conversation like this one.
I just want to tell this: I used to be a moderator in a forum years ago, so I can tell maintaining this forum is hard unpaid work, usually not apparent to the end user. I think moderators do a very good job here, and the “red line” is drawn where it should be. And no, I am not throwing compliments to the moderators just to be pleasant. I would never do that - and even if I wanted to do so, I wouldn’t need to. I might strongly disagree with moderators tomorrow, and that would be ok as well.
So far I only saw freedom of speech here (otherwise I would have being gone immediately) and civilized discussions, even when people disagree. Strong-opinionated people (myself included) are tolerated, and generally people are not afraid of a second opinion opposed to their own.
My humble advice is: keep it like that. Reserve banning for extreme cases, where it is blatantly obvious a ban is objectively justified. I have seen forums becoming a mess just because the “slat” was set too high or too low. Keep said “slat” where it is.
I think overall the user community is doing a good job as well, and the moderators don’t have too much work to do. And that means we can have this kind of difficult discussions (the one in this topic) in the public without it being so much of a problem.
Definitely. Sorry I might not always understand what you are trying to say in some of your posts but I’ve never seen you involved in personal attacks or just repeating statements without any evidence. I’m tempted to say please try harder, but please don´t.
How about we ban you axled for attacking other users personally? I only say this half tongue in cheek as it is rather serious. Or maybe like myself you should learn to show some restraint and stay off the forums when you are too irritated. As you should be able to see this is my first visit in about a week.
I have never attacked others personally in the way you are now. I am opinionated, and stubborn about those opinions. But how exactly is that a bad thing? Like Randy Pauch said… The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Of course he was talking about institutional barriers…but the concept applies broadly, my commentary has little to no affect on you unless you allow it to, and anyone willing to apply a tiny bit of effort can prove or disprove anything I’ve every said. Most of the things that get me aren’t even things like ICU recently they are decisions made in the behind the scenes of Haiku and forced on users without any planning or benchmarking done. So, its really out of line for anyone to make such claims against me when the code they wrote and submitted as developers of Haiku don’t even stand up to the same merits as they are demanding of my mere commentary. In general my commentary is because I want Haiku to be better than it is. Not because I want Haiku to be my vision of Haiku… I just want it to be good.
Anyway believe it or not this forum doesn’t exist to enshrine or worship Haiku’s code or developers… I’m not sure why someone would even want that. That kind of forum would be toxic to innovation, and would be just like any other “circle-jerk” forum on the net. If some developers are vulnerable to critique, they need to toughen up, because listening to critique is how you find places to make things better beyond just the scope of your own personal nit picks on the software you have developed and use. Certainly nothing I’ve ever said here has been with the intention to make anyone feel bad, even about the code in Haiku today that does irritate me, its just there like a mosquito bite, something I hope goes away but meh whatever at this point I’ll live.
You know on many occasions I’ve accepted being wrong. Perhaps you should retract your post because this is certainly an occasion where you are wrong. Wrong at a fundamental level that is acutally most damaging to yourself, and this community.
Cite an instance where I have been involved in personal attacks I’ll wait.
As far as criticism of code without evidence… ABSOLUTELY I have done that especially in instances where the problems affect me directly or where the code in question is WIDELY disliked for well known reasons as is the case with ICU.
If you raise the bar of criticism so high… soon you’ll have no criticism at all. Do you think Haiku will get any better without criticism or at a bare minimum questioning why things are as they are?
Please, Please provide actual feedback on the project that is constructive. All you do is call out stuff, provide 0 evidence, leave. And then come back to criticise something else, provide no evidence and then leave again.
This is blatantly wrong, we have a public forum here, a public bugtracker, a public code review tool. And nothing is forced on anyone, whoever wants to contribute can contribute, it is developed completely in the open.
You are free to provide feedback on any of these public mediums, but your recent actions have been nothing constructive whatsoever.
Just take your most recent response in the Icu forum, not only is it factually wrong (only one ICU alternative was provided for something Haiku does not actually use ICU for) but it adds nothing to the discussion. I’ve provided you feedback why your conduct is inapropriate and you just go “no u provide alternatives!!”. Funky. I did not provide any ICU alternative since I am not well versed in the area of ICU alternatives, and I don’t feel the need to talk out of my ass about these topics.
You on the other hand brought it up in the first place, provided no evidence to support any of your claims (Icu is bloated, alternatives exist etc) and left.
Take this thread as a warning from the community. You have to clean up your act.
If you continue to engage in this unproductive discourse you are a net negative as you are wasting everybody’s time who is dumb enough to read your rants.
This thread is not a personal grudge from axeld against you, he simply brought out into the open what was shared by many people, he did not insult you, and neither is this damaging the community.
Next time please take the time to figure out what for example ICU is used for, whether it is appropriate, are there alternatives etc. Or alternatively if you don’t know about a topic don’t start unproductive discussions about them.
So what you are saying is you think new developers are so low skilled and you think so little of them that they cannot even perform basic critical thinking skills and a simple critique of ICU will throw them into chaos? That’s rough.
At worst case, a simple, yeah… ICU kinda sucks but its what we have right now, so lets not get stuck on that issue right now… would be appropriate.
Exactly. Nothing from this forum or the public bug tracker or anywhere a non developer does anything is forced on anyone.
However many decisions by developers are forced on the rest of us. That’s just how it is. I’m mostly ok with that they put the effort in after all, I’d like some things to have been discussed more in the past or even fixed to be better now, but there is a complete lack of openness to those issues. And they are usually replied to with sunk cost fallacies.
Define actual feedback. Your post is so vague I cannot possibly grok. See? You yourself are guilty of exactly what you claim irritates you about my posts.
On the other hand I’m usually quite exacting about WHAT irritates me, and I sometimes provide my opinion on how it could be better, but nobody is bound to that… obviously.
Next time please take the time to figure out what for example ICU is used for, whether it is appropriate, are there alternatives etc. Or alternatively if you don’t know about a topic don’t start unproductive discussions about them.
Genuinly curious, do you really not understand what is seen as problematic here?
If after this entire thread it is still unclear to you what is seen as wrong with your behaviour I am quite baffled.
I’ve also clearly states what is irritating about your conduct, and have provided examples of what you could have done instead.
But really it all boils to this: If you want to have a discussion you need a thesis, an antiheses to form a synthesis. With your recent discussions this never happened, you just stuck to your original standpoint and refused to provde any arguments or evidence. Pulkomandy for example did provide arguments and evidence, you did not engage with this. A synthesis can never be formed, the project does not move forward and the only thing that happened is time wasted.
If you had provided for example alternative libraries to ICU in the space haiku uses it it could have been investigated, hell maybe it would have been better and somebody integrated it (would save us some hassle with haikuports icu versions). But since there were no alternatives provided and we stuck with the “It’s surely bloated” part nothing came from it.
Is it? Or is it just telling someone to disconnect and cool off. As I already mentioned I took my own advice and did just that myself. Defaulting to assuming someone is insulting you is just as bad as intentionally insulting someone to the health of the community.
I guess old age IS catching up to me… darn it! 
I might not always understand what you are trying to say in some of your posts but I’ve never seen you involved in personal attacks or just repeating statements without any evidence. I’m tempted to say please try harder, but please don´t.