Honestly I don't think anyone currently active in the Drupal community could be framed as more curmedgeonly than myself, but if you want to fight for the title it might be entertaining ;) I think I could phrase "This isn't about you" better. It wasn't meant to target you-you, but you as a developer. I was taking your personal story, applying it as what I imagine many developers who made the same choice you did felt and saying, This isn't about developers vs. non-developers, and I feel the question of "How do we make it a good place for developers to work?" isn't the right question. No, I wasn't trying to personally invalidate the experience you bring to the table, although I can see how specifically stating exactly that might have confused people. I'll sit hear and chew on my foot a while. I guess what I am ultimately saying, is we keep saying This *or* that. Would it be helpful to take a little of our thought process and say, "what if?". I mean, we have a goal here, right? How do we make an infrastructure that supports newcomers, facilitates developers, concentrates on non-disruptive integration of factions, and keeps our community strong?" When I say 'you won't please everybody' I mean it, but I feel like the current conversation is please A or please B, there is no C. Throw both those models out, and lets figure out what we actually want. -Sam Sam Tresler 646-246-8403 On Fri, 18 Mar 2011, Earl Miles wrote:
On 3/18/2011 1:52 PM, Sam Tresler wrote:
Really, a way to translate what you're saying is that you'd rather *I* didn't have a place where I can participate, because I don't want to be inundated with support requests.
This isn't about you. That thinking is part of the problem, in my opinion. We're having a conversation here about what is best for Drupal, not what is best for the developers. I'm not trying to be inflammatory, but making the project worse for the end users, the documenters, the forum posters, and various other people who bring good things to the table isn't a tenable solution.
Prior to #drupal-contribute being split out, we had a bot that would, several times a day, 'correct' people about which channel they should be asking support questions in. Sometimes these corrections were taken amiss. No matter how politely we framed them, I always found these corrections to be offensive.
One of the reasons I left #drupal was because I was tired of how offensive that was.
What webchick wants is a place where everyone can gather and be happy. But, like you just said, we can't please everyone.
If the choice is to please new people who may or may not contribute, who may or may not stick around, at the expense of people who are contributing and have stuck around, that is going to create churn.
I'm not in agreement with the camp that says our current system is telling new users to go away. I think our OLD system was telling new users to go away, by throwing them into an environment that they fundamentally won't be ready for.
And I think it's wrong to insist that people who are on IRC to do work have to stick around in an environment where they will have to watch a bot tell new users to screw off (in nicer words...well, eventually. For at least a year it was NOT nicer words) is fundamentally wrong and counterproductive.
Naturally, I find it interesting that when I tried to write from my experience and my example and how I use IRC, the responses are "This isn't about you."
Why are you allowed to write about your experiences as being normal, yet my experience makes me elitist and/or childish? Why is it you're assuming that I'm only doing this to make my life easier, and screw the newbies? Am I really that curmudgeonly?
So, making this about me: I just interpreted, "Get off IRC. It's for new people." (Yes, that's tongue in cheek).