I will no longer be able to assist with development nor debugging actual issues with the software… Quite juvenile behavior from the devs. It stemmed from this issue where the devs continuously argued in public by opening and closing an issue. Anyway, thought I would keep y’all apprised of the situation, since these are the people maintaining the software you are currently using.
Informative, and unfortunate.
100% agree with your take on the original issue - it should be a discussion between the devs, not edging along the lines of an argument. However, I do feel like the discussion would have been better suited to the dev Matrix chat or something
Even if they were upsetted by your comments, banning you was not the right way to handle that IMO.
Just do it like other projects - tag it as enhancement, postpone it forever, be done with it. And in case it’s a useful enhancement, you can see the votes accumulating on the issue and maybe really reconsider implementing it?
You kept posting offtopic comments which added nothing to resolving the issue. So I gave you a seven day ban, hopefully it will teach you a lesson.
Can you point us to these comments so we avoid the same fate? Or perhaps contribution guidelines so we understand what to do or not do? I’ve never seen anyone banned for good faith contributions in OSS before.
I tracked down the PR in the screenshot and it seems pretty innocuous.
Reopening the same issue multiple times after it getting closed is a dick move. The contributer was pretty clear about the reasoning why. You are just wasting people’s time with feature requests like that.
This is ridiculously petty from the devs, and does make me seriously wonder about Lemmy’s future.
Idk if they care about a particular thing FOOS devs are often petty. I don’t think it’s actually a threat to the project. Like read unix mailing lists from Linus or whoever else, it can get downright toxic. e.g.:
"BULLSHIT. Have you looked at the patches you are talking about? You should have - several of them bear your name. […] As it is, the patches are COMPLETE AND UTTER GARBAGE. […] WHAT THE F*CK IS GOING ON? " here
I think Linus gets away with a lot because the value Linux delivers is pretty out of this world.
Being rude to people trying to contribute in good faith seems like a way to send them to a competitor and if one exists, that doesn’t bode well for the project.
Opening an issue that is a feature request is hardly a contribution, especially if there are few full time devs it might be a distraction more than a contribution, and there is like 1 open source competitor.
Ideas are free, finished working code is expensive, if the devs think they can’t get to it in the next N years they probably just don’t want to see it.
As I said I don’t buy how this would be an actual problem, maybe it’s rude but who cares, the admin is essentially an end user demanding something, at the end of the day he can write it himself or stfu. The devs time will certainly be spent better almost anywhere else than arguing on a GitHub issue.
If ideas are free, why do Fortune 500 companies routinely bribe their customers to tell them about the experience so far?
Because feedback from people using your software is valid and valuable. Feedback from power users of your software (admins of instances) is even more valuable.
I understand why you feel the way you feel, but this isn’t how a healthy project is run.
You say the devs time would be better spent developing and I agree. Interesting that they took time out of their day to issue a ban and then come here to weakly defend it. It’s almost like they could have just ignored the OP and none of this would have happened.
In the first part I disagree, fortune 500 aren’t looking for ideas they are gathering data, the difference here is one of quantity. And they will at least usually not gather free form things unless they have significant resources to commit to sorting through it. Or it’s specifically payed support.
Feedback is valuable only if actionable, if the feedback can’t be acted on because one dev largely already said yes and the other one largely thinks there is more important stuff right now it’s not actionable. That’s why companies have teams specifically for market research or marketing or whatever, they don’t usually let the devs gather it themselves. And in the case of big open source projects with full time staff handling the issues on the GitHub might be partially done by a not dev team. Or a dev team member that’s not a dev themselves.
Yes the dev can choose to spend time bickering about this here, I don’t really care and I never said he should develop instead, I might think it’s stupid but again who cares. Ignoring would perhaps have been better but blocking for 7 days is almost like ignoring, just that the trigger is blocked for 7 days as well, completely reasonable to do if it was actually annoying, and it might’ve been considering it was two largely unnecessary comments.
I even agree with you that the devs seem sorta toxic and maybe their project management style is unhealthy, but they are devs, as long as they continue to develop a reasonable software who cares how it’s run. They are not pr or even project managers, they are devs, maybe they chose their job by what they can do and just ended up having to do the community management on GitHub as well because their software is open source.
If they actually had active control over the future of the software in the general sense, i.e. if it was closed source i would be concerned with the characters running the project. But it’s open source, the future doesn’t depend on specific devs, it’s explicitly set up so that the current devs could die or delete it or whatever, and in response anyone willing could create a fork with a scheduler and anything else they might want, it even works with a federated approach so any fork would be backwards compatible.
Looks like snowe missed the fact that each of those close/reopens were months apart, so it’s clear the issue would ge re-opened, still not addressed after many many months, then closed to clean up the backlog, then re-opened because it actually still has value.
Snowe it seems interpreted this as two people fighting and not just normal stuff that happens on giant repos with many devs.
What he did wrong was comment about behaviors/edicit on a PR, which is not the appropriate place to have that convo.
PR comments are for talking about the PR, not for having meta convos about comments on PRs.
I don’t even participate in this repo, but I can say that snowe was off topic here.
However the owner’s reaction of a whopping seven day ban and “learn your lesson” comment was also abrasive and unreasonable.
Both sides fucked up here, get ya’lls shit together and apologize to each other yo.
Well yeah the second comment didn’t really had to be, but hey it’s certainly not really reason enough to ban someone from the repo. The first comment I think is totally ok (as well as marking it off-topic, but optimally with an answer, probably marked as off-topic as well). Just keep an issue (it’s not a PR) open, until the issue is resolved in one way or the other i.e. either solved reasonably via a third-party client (with links to it) or directly in the repo, asking the community (when it’s not obvious that the issue is resolved), whether this is resolved, wait for reactions, and close it after some time based on that. Banning someone, or quickly closing or not reopening after a carefully written argument, that the issue is not solved etc. is just childish behaviour, especially for a community focused project (I’m watching a few lemmy issues on GH).
or quickly closing or not reopening after a carefully written argument
Thats where I think the misunderstanding was, if you look at the dates, many of the closings happened months after the issue was opened and no one posted anything on it, so it would clearly look to be a stale issue, so its reasonable to give a quick “Im closing this because of x” comment.
Often in those cases the person is doing a bunch of cleanup and has to close dozens of stale issues, so writing a multi paragraph response on every single one is a lot of time to put into it.
Then later the issue is re-opened again because it actually isnt stale, it just looks stale, and the cycle repeats as it continues to sit on the backburner.
This is all very normal on any larger project, its pretty common to see issues get closed and re-opened if they are very low priority and sit on the backburner for literally years, and its common to see they have a bunch of short “Im closing this because x” responses as a result.
But, if you look at the dates, you go "Oh, I see, these comments are months apart and not even really a “convo” but more just documentation.
misunderstanding was
I think here’s a misunderstanding too :). With quickly I mean closing without getting feedback, or without providing a good reason why the issue is closed (without being obviously resolved), not the dates (which I think are only relevant, when actually awaiting a response). I have seen this over the repo a few times, good writeups often explaining some behavior etc. and then bam closed, either as duplicate (although it’s not (example)), or “not as planned” etc. I think this is not good behavior for an open source project (I’m around the block for a few years contributing and maintaining OSS, for reference…). Especially as this is a real community project and not some random opinionated application (well depending on how you define it, could be true to lemmy, but I don’t think it is…)
I rather let an issue open than close it, “just to have fewer open issues”. I can close it anytime, and if someone searches for that issue sees it closed while it isn’t resolved, it just creates confusion…
