Hello all,
Thank you everyone for your kind words on this matter. I appreciate it very much, although I didn’t know how to respond back then.
On 26 Nov 2020, at 03:47, Jon Murphy jcmurphy26@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Michael,
Sorry for the late reply to your note. I've been sick the past few days and sleeping too much. All is good now.
Sorry for what you are going through. It really takes the joy out of working especially when working at something you love. Nobody should ever be subject to this abuse.
Luckily, absuse has somewhat disappeared recently. I am getting rather kind emails from users or people send me a nice email and said why they donated a couple of bucks to the project. That feels really nice.
I completely agree with taking a step aside. Take whatever time is needed. You definitely deserve the time off!
Yes, many people told me that they can absolutely understand my - rather confusing - reasoning, because they have considered the same. Various people are popping in and out of the forum and are usually leaving with a feeling of disappointment.
I do not want that.
I want our community to be a nice one. Although this is not the lounge of the Internet and people come here to solve a problem, there is no need that this cannot be done in a nice way.
Two months ago, I was considering to simply shut down the community portal. It has been a pain point for a long time, and the transition from the old software to Discourse has not really helped too much. I do not know really what I expected but at least a change in dynamic.
I would suggest never fully reading the nasty messages. Find a nasty part - hit the delete key! It won't give you any insight to their problem and it isn't worth your time. And it will definitely bring you down.
As I heard, more messages have been deleted without any further ado. Has that helped? I do not know. Did anyone notice change?
After the November holiday I'll reach out to the Community moderations. I have a few thoughts and suggestions of ways to make this better: (e.g., watchlist / sh**list of bad apples, flagging sh** messages ). It'll probably take 100 little things that'll make the difference.
Side thought: I use Apple Mail and SpamSieve. Maybe you can set its corpus up with nasty words (e.g., arsehole) from nasty messages. Trash anything nasty before reading it! The delete key is your friend!
People don’t use nasty language. After all, I am German and that language is a lot filthier than English. We say things as they are, and that is not really what is bothering me.
What is bothering me more is that people are wasting my time, because I am not really convinced that they are hoping to get their problem fixed with emails like this. They want to vent. Maybe it is a sign of the times that they cannot do it elsewhere, and maybe we are simply the first victim that they randomly find. It does’t really matter.
One of the recent public examples would be this tweet: https://twitter.com/BaatorianPrince/status/1344704180913627141
“Nothing works”. Well, I am glad for you that you found better software. This software works absolutely fine for me.
Hope you are able to get out and do something different!
The pandemic does not really help with this, but I found some time to do something different :)
But now, I would like to talk about how we can fix this. The other day, we got a message from another person who said that they gave up on the Community Portal and I cannot accept that. Me not being a leading example here, it is not what I want.
It is not a requirement in the project to read every single post on there, and of course I cannot and do not want to force anyone to do things they do not enjoy.
But if we want to keep the Community alive, we all need to engage with it in some way.
So I am here to ask for ideas on how we can achieve this? I would like to have a conversation about what is going wrong (are we doing something wrong or is it just the same everywhere else) and what we can do about it.
To me, engaging with the community is essential to good development and ultimately to the success of the project. Right now, it does not give a very good image of us and what are all doing.
How can we fix this?
Best, -Michael
Take care! Jon
Message: 2 Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2020 19:17:32 +0000 From: Michael Tremer michael.tremer@ipfire.org To: "IPFire: Development-List" development@lists.ipfire.org Subject: I am taking a little break Message-ID: B78EB821-A9F1-4B41-8E18-5A494AAEDD2F@ipfire.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Hello everyone,
I would like to announce that I am taking a hiatus from the support forum on community.ipfire.org.
The main reason is not new, but I thought that it has been enough in the last few weeks: The amount of abuse I receive is unreasonable. It comes in personal messages, emails and on public forums and are often quite personal.
I do not want to give any examples, because those people do not deserve that their message is being singled out. There is no incident in particular that has caused me frustration, but you all have seen what is being posted publicly and that is good enough to work as a foundation to what I would like to point out...
We have a bit of a problem with our discourse. People have an entitlement problem, put no work into their posts and expect - or even demand - people to do their job for them.
I feel that reading those posts and writing a response which is not being read by the original poster (let alone them trying to implement what I suggested) is a waste of time. Of course it is up to them, but why would you ask in the first place? Usually the problem is that it was not understood what I answered.
Who would have thought that IT security is hard?
I am tired of trying to educate people about the most basic things that are required to run IPFire. I am sick and tired of seeing IPFire being used wrong and therefore people complaining about things that do not work as they want them. I feel like I am explaining the same things over and over again.
I am done with having endless debates about the same topics which are done already. Different people bring up the same arguments again but that does not change anything. They complain when not being answered in length when they are just too lazy to search for the answer in a previous post.
I am being very frustrated and this is not good for neither me or the community.
Not coming across as my finest recently I believe that I am starting to act unfairly towards people who have not done anything wrong and try to make a difference in this project. It will be better if I invested my time into those things than those outlined above.
Closing the forum entirely was a thought that crossed my mind many more times than once - and I know that I am not the online one who is thinking that. It was in fact debated on our monthly team meeting before.
I do not care about the offenders and bullies at all. Trolls are gonna troll. There is only very little chance to point someone into the right direction and help them to help themselves. I would rather prefer to have a smaller user base instead of having these people who are destroying the community - willingly or unwillingly.
We are an open source project - one community. I do care a lot about that - and I would not allow anyone to destroy what we have all achieved together. It is sad to say, that it only needs very few people to spoil it for the rest of us.
My personal pride aside, those who know me in person can tell you that I do not care much about any defamation towards me, or accusations, blame or being called an arsehole. But I do know for a fact that others take them less lightly.
Some things recently have stopped being fun and are now quite the opposite. To avoid ruining mine and other people?s days I have decided to stop reading and replying on the support forum. I am not contributing anything useful for anyone and it has not given me any input that will help me to do my job better. This won?t be a big loss to anyone.
I would even encourage the rest of you who feel passionate about it help to make that place useful again. It is the only place that we have where our community can be.
This announcement is just there to let you all know that my perception of the project might vary from yours in the near future. I will of course be around on the development mailing list and get involved in the debates that we have on here and would like to remind everyone to keep development talk on this list for that reason and avoid having that on the support forum.
If anyone has something to say about this, I would be happy to read your thoughts. If you do not want to disclose them in public, feel free to email me in private, too.
And now I am going to focus on that massive pile of work I have to do?
Best, -Michael