[OpenID] On the banning of Santosh

[Dick Hardt]

David, 

I disagree with removing Santosh from the mail list. I prefer a fully inclusive community. I remember some pretty abusive flame wars on the perl5-porters mail list in the early 90s. The inclusive approach that Larry Wall took was that we all knew where the delete key was, and if we were lazy, we could add the annoying member to a kill file so that we never saw their email.

While I can empathize with the frustration of someone not being what we consider respectful, banning someone for a subjective action is a slippery slope. Banning someone for sending spam is a different manner[1].

Written guidelines/rules for a mail list (or any tool) codify the expected behaviour and are a "good" thing to have. The Microformats policy [2] is a reasonable starting point and contains many common expected behaviours of internet mail lists.. Note that some of the items are guidelines and some are rules. There is one "rule" in the microformats that I disagree with. Unfortunately the the points are not numbered, so I have added my own number to the rule I don't agree with:


(16) People who violate the goodwill of the list community will be unsubscribed with extreme prejudice. Not to mention haste.

This is a subjective rule and difficult for someone to know if they are violating it, or who is judging if a violation occurs.

There are two "guidelines" that are similar, but don't explicitly result in being banned form the list. They are:

(8) We encourage discussion and debate, and don’t mind if it gets a bit heated. However, this does not mean you can flame other list members. If you think someone’s flaming you or being needlessly offensive, take it up with them in private e-mail. If they get abusive, discuss it with the list administrators (the e-mail address is in the headers of every list message). Don’t take it onto the list. Regardless of how long you’ve been online, we highly recommend a reading of the following: Avoiding Personal Conflict on Mailing Lists.

(10) Try not to offend other list members, or to feel offended by them. See the section below titled “Offensensitivity” for more.


I would propose that we adopt the Microformats policy except for #16 (and number them!), allow Santosh back on the list, apologize for banning him, and direct him at the new policy and ask that he (and others) comply.

-- Dick

[1] spam does have an objective definition of unsolicited commercial email that could be used for banning someone from a mail list. We all know it when we see it.

[2] http://microformats.org/mailinglists-policies