Hi,
I am writing this with my DWG hat on.
The OSM user diaries are not routinely moderated but the DWG has the
technical means to hide comments or whole posts, and will make use of
these in extreme situations.
I am writing to inform you that there as been one such situation, where
a contributor time and time again over recent months used various
expletives and insults to belittle the work of others in the project.
He's been told to stop it numerous times; at one point when told that
insults don't get him anywhere he said that he disagreed, because he had
actually got a reaction to an insult. In another situation where he was
told that his message could be heard better if he weren't wrapping it in
so much bile, he responded "don't tell me what to do".
We first tried to only hide those comments that were absolutely
inacceptable ("viciuos brat", "violent little shit" etc.) but even those
messages that were factual were always seasoned with a sentence
explaining how this and that other person was an idiot, amateur, etc.,
so in the end we just hid a handful of blog entries altogether. We
wouldn't normally moderate someone for calling someone else an "amateur"
but if it's framed by constant, stronger abuse then that lowers the bar
considerably.
It is unfortunate because this means that quite a few useful comments
written by some of you - the main subject was ways of fighting diary
spam - were dropped too.
As I said, it's a rare exception for us to have to do this; these
messages, especially because they weren't one-off heat-of-the-moment
posts but a sustained onslaught, far surpassed in offensiveness anything
I've seen on this or any other OSM mailing list in recent years.
I won't say who the user is - those of you who were involved will
recognize it, and those who weren't probably shouldn't waste any time
with it.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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