Hi Boris,
On 2016-10-08 15:17, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
On 10/8/16 11:39 AM, Filipus Klutiero wrote:
[...]
3. Three of these were marked as incomplete, when there was no
request for any more information about these.
I agree that private mail to ask for the information may have been better.
Note that asking for information in the bug would not have allowed you to
respond, given that the account was disabled.
That said, a disabled account is typically a sign that someone was
argumentative or abusive to the point where interacting with them was not being
productive at all, so I can understand people not wanting to engage in that
situation...
That is not even what I meant. These reports were marked as incomplete when
there was not a single comment asking for more information displayed in
Bugzilla. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=830048 is the clearest
example, since there was no comment at all. Even now, nobody has requested any
information, yet the report displays as incomplete.
6. My account on bugs.mozilla.org has been disabled by another
contributor who has not provided a justification.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1288913#c9 seems to be the
justification.
The only sentence related to this which I can identify there is the following:
unfortunately your activities here have left me with little choice but to
disable your account.
Since the author did not specify what he meant by "here", which activities he referred to
or even anything which he would consider suboptimal in these unspecified activities,
"non-justification" would seem like a better description of that sentence.
As the forwarded mail shows, I have requested an actual justification from
[email protected], but I still have not received any reply at this
point. I will report when a justification is provided (I will also report of
any progress I see on the other issues reported).
[...]
10. There is no link to the contact point offered when a contributor's
account is disabled.
Generally accounts are disabled at the point when it becomes clear that
engaging with someone is never productive. In this case, it's not clear to me
that this was the case, though I can see how someone dealing only with
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1288913 could come to that
conclusion...
Obviously, everyone does errors, and an organization as large as Mozilla cannot
avoid some errors, which will be serious at times. If my own account has been
disabled, there is reason for concern about other disabled accounts.
But that was item 6. Item 10 is kind of a meta-issue about item 6 and other
misuses of account suspension. It is to be hoped that most accounts disabled
are indeed overall counter-productive. Unfortunately, I do not know you
personally, and even if I could trust your judgment on that, it could still be
the case that such misuses would be regularly turning away important
contributors. Item 10 is about ensuring that issues such as those mentioned in
item 6 are infrequent, and are solved efficiently.
When a desirable contributor sees his contributions unduly restricted, there
are 2 options:
1. Refrain from contributing until the issue "solves itself"
2. Request the restriction to be lifted
Most of our contributors are volunteers. Selecting option 2 involves further
volunteer investment. There is a real chance that contributors will choose the
first option. Considering item 7, it is quite likely that the contrary is also
not announced, which likely means that contributors who go with option 1 will
be permanently lost.
Elements which contributors will use to choose include:
1. the reason(s) why the restriction was put in place
2. the process which led to the implementation of the restriction, which
normally includes warnings
3. the expected probability that a request will lead to a lifting of the
restriction
4. the expected future contribution experience which would follow a lifting of
the restriction
If the affected contributor has received no justification, nor even a
notification, let alone an explanation of the process which led to the
decision, no warnings, cannot see a list of other restrictions which were put
in place, nor even the number of such restrictions which are ongoing, the
contributor will need an extreme confidence in the project to choose the second
option. And it seems we have such situations.
Are there measures designed to incite participants to solve issues?
No, apart from people wanting to have a clear list of what work actually needs to be done
(and hence removing things that don't need to be done from the "list of things that
need to be done").
Thank you. I have quickly looked for a Mozillian equivalent of KDE commit
digests's Bug Killers section and indeed could not find one.
--
Filipus Klutiero
http://www.philippecloutier.com
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