Banned... No good deed goes unpunished

Michael Horne wrote:

 

the only guidance they provide is "Be nice to each other."

It's completely misleading though, because being polite does not stop you from being banned.

As far as I can tell by observation, their actual unstated guidance is "Do not engage us in  suggestions for improvement, critical analysis, unbiased appraisal nor description of problems, because all of these things will be construed as direct criticism and taken personally, and we make up reasons to ban you no matter how accurate and polite your contribution."

In other words, they don't accept accurate and uncoloured feedback, the kind that is totally normal in the engineering process.  Iterated improvement is stillborn if you cannot discuss and analyse problems because their mere mention gets you banned.  This is a well respected process that is used throughout all of the engineering professions every working day, and I'm totally puzzled why RPF does not understand how it works.

I do believe mention of the word "unprofessional" got me banned.

The lack of response from the forum email address and the developer in question, says it all.

The MagPi editor seems to have nothing to say either.

Good Dilbert today. Reminds me of RS vs the World.

http://dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/100000/60000/9000/000/169095/169095.strip.print.gif

Michael Horne wrote:

 

Fair enough, but the only guidance they provide is "Be nice to each other."

Actually, the phrase liz used is: "Be good to each other".  YMMV but to me there is an important distinction between "good" and "nice".  I think "nice" is well understood, meaning to say things in an inoffensive, friendly way and help foster a happy community.  OTOH, "good" makes me think of phrases like "good for you" and "this is for your own good".  Nobody ever says "this is for your own nice".  So now we enter the realm of "what is good?" and "what's good for the community?" versus "can't we just all be nice to each other?"  JMO/YMMV

So I try to write nice comments which are good for the community.

Billy's persistent whingeing keeps reminding me of one of my favorite Monty Python lines:

Michael Palin says:

 

I would like to complain about people who hold things up by complaining about people who complain!  I think something should be done about it!  [16-ton weight drops on him.]

They only banned my username on the raspberry pi forums so I can still scan them as a guest although I am not sure that I want to any more as if my raspberry pi doesn't arrive soon i'll cancel my RS order and use the money for something else like beer or a tablet to rip apart. but i'm curious about one thing. in this thread i've seen a couple of the admins and mods names from that other place mentioned but they have loads of admins and mods so are they ALL nasty or are some of them actually ok?

some mods do more banning than others, but it's not like a jury trial where it

matters how many approve of your post.  You only need to be banned by one

of them to be banned by all.  Some are also more likely than others to make

personal attacks, like calling someone an idiot, or to use sarcasm to escalate

a situation rather than calming it.  But I don't think it would necessarily be useful

for us to try to somehow rate each mod on some friendliness scale.

David Ross wrote:

 

They only banned my username on the raspberry pi forums so I can still scan them as a guest although I am not sure that I want to any more as if my raspberry pi doesn't arrive soon i'll cancel my RS order and use the money for something else like beer or a tablet to rip apart. but i'm curious about one thing. in this thread i've seen a couple of the admins and mods names from that other place mentioned but they have loads of admins and mods so are they ALL nasty or are some of them actually ok?

JMO/YMMV: in general, the RasPi staff are hard-working and dedicated and try to be helpful.  But they're human and each has his or her quirks and there are topics you have to either avoid or comment on very carefully.  They're very busy (and get tired) and have to deal with a lot of rude e-mail we don't see, so I'm not surprised that sometimes one of them lashes out in a way that seems extreme if you haven't been following RasPi for a long time.

Since we're usually discussing problems here at element14, it's easy to get the impression that there are nothing but problems chez RasPi.  In fact, most of the discourse there is technical and helpful.  Today I'd like to compliment jamesh for his polite response to a difficult first poster in this RasPi thread.  RasPi gets a lot of this sort of nonsense so I admire jamesh's restraint.

This is amazing to me because SO/SE is pretty much acknowledged by professional and hobbyist programmers alike to be THE place for peer-validated and reliable knowledge exchange.  This is because search traffic drives users to SO/SE because their SEO is so optimized and they have been working on making Q&A better for 4 years now - not just trying to do Q&A in the old forum paradgim.

You're right, search traffic gets driven to SO/SE, so much so that I end every programming related google search with -stackexchange -stackoverflow. The big problem being that the quality of the responses is often poor, misleading, too far out of date, or outright incorrect and even an unanswered question makes it to the top of the search results. IME it's THE place for unreliable knowledge.

The 'old forum paradigm' as you put it is simply a symptom of a disease, probably incurable, they've never been the right way. Unfortunately people don't listen, don't learn from the mistakes of history and we just end up with things like SE that push the metaphor even further in the wrong direction.

I'll note that I haven't seen a really good way of doing Q&A style stuff, but have seen lots of good examples of how not to do it.

David,

I got my username banned and then both my home IP (static) and even worse than that, my employers outward facing IP address.

I asked nicely to be unbanned, as I didn't want to block everyone in my company from seeing the pi stuff, although there would probably only be a few people interested. If they had just stopped at my details i'd not have been bothered (that's what a VPN is for after all!) but I did think the work address one was way over the top.

The did unblock me on both IP addresses, but I don't visit there much any more because of the attitude.

Steve

selsinork wrote:

 

I'll note that I haven't seen a really good way of doing Q&A style stuff, but have seen lots of good examples of how not to do it.

IMO the best way to handle Q&A is to deliberate on a forum but then someone has to make the effort to put the answer on a wiki, which should become the starting point for questions.  One of the best I've seen is BeagleBoard's community FAQ: http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardFAQ.  The RasPi wiki is also excellent.  But quality depends on having people who care enough to update the wiki.

I dislike doing Internet searches because of the low signal/noise ratio and high commerce/information ratio.  For general searches, I start with Wikipedia (and I do contribute money).  For movies, it's IMDB.