Forum's policy just a joke?

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Hi there,

if you'd probably noticed, I'd been quite active here once and not anymore, I thought I take the risk of exposure anyways, because I care, and let you know why:

In the last 2-3 years there is a noticable change of the tone in forums and lists, getting more and more rude, also our community has a full-time very-proud-to-be-troll since ever, and due to his expertise, it seems he's constantly getting away with it here, where anywhere else, he's flagged and banned.

There is a post here, claiming an object to be a slut, the Plone foundation didn't take action at all.
I didn't feel to go into any senseless dicussion, it should be a matter of course to take care, that this forum is a respectful place for everyone, just in case the foundation is actually interested to gain more attraction amongst people, in order to better promote Plone.

I'm sure the argument, that the dismissive term used wasn't targeted at persons, but objects, will be brought up now immediately. I see that differently. I'm pretty sure, if anyone had used the N-word, there'd be an immediate moderation. John Lennon once wrote a song "Woman is the N***** of the world", while I don't agree with that literally, you might get the point.

Also the foundation tries to promote a technique called "Mockup", the main information-source about it, is the author's blog, who thought it'd be funny to use an example username, implicating the user is female and sexually aroused. Besides of making sure, to be not inviting towards a female audience, it is questionable if that helps to make a professional impression, when it comes to presenting Plone to customers, f.e.
I contacted a foundation member privately about it, hoping for a removal of these lines, without making too much of a fuzz about it, and got this response: "I asked him to be more gender-inclusive".
The only person who had the guts, to make a comment about it was Christian Ledermann, thank you very much for taking the courage, because also men who ally, unfortunately experience severe harrassment, some of them causing to stop the support.

Also why Discourse was chosen as a new tool for our community, stays behind the curtains. Anyone who can read, should know about the issues going on around their founders and CEO's. Anyone thinking commercial success can justify spreading lethal seeds, should maybe spend a second to think about, if you're probably close to the people justifying one of the most cruelst aera of human history with the argument, that not everything was bad and great achievements had been done by the torturers, also.

A lot of community members are incredibly helpful and respectful, but this is shadowed over of the bad behaviour of a few, and I actually caught myself to get into this tune, too, becoming a belittleler, also.

I'd been granted admin-permissions here silently, which is already an odd way to do, please disgrant them, I don't want to have the public misunderstanding, I'd carry along with this unculture, thanks.

All of my poor PHP-hooked fellowers, who I tried to intrigue into the beauty of ZOPE and Plone < 5, gave me an utterly negative feedback, one point was always the rudeness on the lists. Please get it: people are afraid to ask freely, if you want that: Fine and sorry for wasting your time.

Thanks, Ida

1 Like
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Hi Ida,

for me the policy on this forum and in the community is not a joke. And I will try to help to improve it.

Is it possible to add a few links, because I have difficulty following the different points you raise here.

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Update 2: The OP of the slut-post, who I wasn't addressing at all, but the moderation of this forum, sended me an email. Feel free to post your concerns here.

Update: I now got a private message via the admins-channel, saying that "slut" was of course a typo and has by now also been changed to "slug". While I dare to doubt it was a typo, but purposely done like that, so one can say "it was just a typo", in anyway this post pranked unmodified for weeks.
I'm so fed up now everyone pretends to not have noticed, really.
I will not take "it was just a joke" anymore of anyone.
Please, please, please disgrant the admin-permissions and dont send me PM's anymore, these things should be dealt openly with.
And now to something completely different.... Life!
By, Ida

Hi polyester,

just have a look at the posts-lists and you should find your way to the mentioned post, I don't want to insult your intelligence here just search for SLUT!
Concerning the mentioned external post: Rok Grabas seems to have done some sort of transformation to a mininimum amount of matureness. That'll be the positive intepretation of why his post doesn't show up anymore in search-results of "Mockup" + "Plone".

While I do appreciate you're immediate response and willingness for real change, this rant was ment as an aftermath, to give some transparency for my decision to phase out for a while in participating, because I prefer to spend my precious lifetime in less toxic enviroments. Ok, that's abstruse, facing, that I'm still a smoker, but I hope you get my point and understand that I will probably not go into further expanded discussions right now, thanks!

In anyway it is pretty surprising, that you guys'n'gals seem to not have noticed at all. It could also be interpretated as a silent agreement with the poster.

Usually Steve McMahon would say a word, that didn't happen. Thank you very much Steve also, for your courage and educational attempts by occasionally posting relevant links in IRC, to raise awareness for the disadvantage for Plone, if exclosuring structures for certain groups continue.

While Stefania and Christina seem to feel well here (where are the other women gone? any correlation with the tourette-post?), I hope it's on your plate, that any person hitting this forum, without knowing the neurosis of violent posters in detail, will certainly stay far away, unless existentially forced to. Force rarely breeds true growth.

Ida

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I honestly had not noticed, I do not get all topics in as email (info overload) and do miss topics regularly.

I have changed that word now; as the word 'slug' is correct and appeared earlier in the title, I would interpret as a (very unfortunate) mistake, but I can see it can be constructed otherwise just as well.

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Hi Ida!
Thanks for sharing your (good) opinion about your (bad) experience.

I am not really active on this networks, but when I am I try to as respectful and helpful as I can.
After this I will try to be even more.

I think your words deserve careful attention by anybody, even if @polyester already demonstrated we do care about.

Hope to read more from you soon!
Ciao :smile:

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I've revoked your admin, as asked.

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Even if I google/bing "Discourse tool problem" or similar I dont find anything relevant addressing "the issues going on around their founders and CEO's". Can you point me in the right direction please?

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Thank you, Paul!

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Glad you asked:
Robin Ward is proud until today to have created forumwarz.com, I clicked a little bit through it once and it's actually pretty funny sometimes, it's just, if you look at the intro-picture, you'll see an internetcafe and actually he took care to show off a glimpse of recognizing diversity, by picturing not only white male teens in front of the screens, no! There's also a female white teen. Apparently not interested into the machines, because buisy giving herself a breast-massage, yey!
When it comes to Jeff Atwoods, who has issues in enabling the feautures our community needs and claimed (please dont ask me for another link, ask the admins), you'll certainly find plenty of provocative posts, my favourite (in bad terms) was the one where he says sth like woman are naturally not made for maths because they are not asperger enough and accompanies that with some meaningless piecharts, trying to give a sort of pseudo-scientific touch to it, which insults people with Asperger, woman and man at once, so basically everyone.

I'm probably spoiled by working a lot in scientific contexts where this kind nonsense didn't occur at all, it feels like being in highschool again, when reading such stuff.

Who of the both had the need to brag off on twitter or sth, that he's earning 600 bucks in an afternoon, I dont remember, it's just I'm not sure if Plone wants to be connected with this "culture".

The interested audience might use their searchskills and maybe also more than the ubiquious one and the blingbling-crap, both too subjective and manipulative in their selections and rankings for my taste. DuckDuckGo, usually gives me the seemingly neutral and "objective" results on the terms entered, but there's much more alternatives, of course.

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Hi alert! Thanks for your lines, of course I'll be happy to rejoin, after finishing a completely Plone-unrelated project, so maybe in some months, but that is completely unimportant, this is not about me, it's about the countless people pushed away and no one notices, because that stays invisible. I'm sure some more transparency will boost everything, the art of failure and the importance of admitting to not know something, could be helpful, too. My last cent for now, Ciao!

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Am I wrong or why can't I see my two replies to this thread?
Anyone censoring?

-aj

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Has anyone seen MacYET? I expected him to post here too.

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I only see his most recent on 45 minutes ago from this post.

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Good morning Andreas,

I will not cite the Email you sended to me, because I don't want that the public could get a wrong impression of your person, as in the real world, I experienced you as a nice and humble person, super professional and a pleasure to work for. Full stop.

I would like to address the point though, that you felt personally accused of being a sexist and it is important to me to make clear, that my lines were not all addressing your person, rather the way how it is (not) delt with, if offending terms are used in posts. Nobody noticed it, ok. I did, when it arrived in my mailbox and also last week, when I was schroogeling for z3c-related things: It showed up in the top-results. So maybe here no one noticed, but my person, but you bet, the world did.

I see that my personal doubt, that this was typo, can be taken as an accusation at your person that you could be a sexist, which wasn't the intention, but I hope you are not blind to the series of insults you're doing in public spaces and that influences the overall perception of your person in the digital media and that the foregoing incidents will easily lead to such doubts and conclusions.

I don't now, if you are aware, that if anyone thinks you'd be a sexist and you'd posted the lines you sended in an Email to me, here also, it would just confirm that assumption, and here's another interpration of mine: That wasn't intended by your side, that's why I don't want to paste it here.

Dear Andreas: My point is not about sexism only, at all. It's about being a decent human. It's for example also about calling people publicly "stupid" and it mainly makes me sad to see, that this incredible valuable resources you could provide are buried under superfluous flamewars.

Of course it needs clear messages. You once brought up the example of Linus Torvalds, addressing a kernel-developer in a very direct way.
One difference is though: Linus provides clear directives and they had been repeatedly violated, whereas in the Plone world there are hardly clear directives. You might remember people promoting heavily to use Grok, unfortunately not so much by giving reasonables but orders: "You have to use it", two years later the same persons are saying "Don't use Grok!", etc. But that'll open up another topic now, like why the only existing formalization of making decisions, had been omitted, concerning the used techniques in Plone 5: the PLIPs. That was usually a source where one could read about the reasonables. No one can expect clearness, if things are kept intransparent. I am not convinced of many introduced techniques and I would have loved to let myself be convinced in discussions, learning about more pro-arguments than the written ones, I could find. Or better: not find. The arguments I've seen so far, are too vague and not compelling to me, imho often also not addressing the real issues but working around it, thereby producing unnecessary complexity (A big yawn here to everyone thinking to come up again with: "Well, maybe then you're not able to cope the complexity". Right...) Asking furthermore is not an option for me right now, because of the negative experience I had with that, so far.

Dear Andreas: If I had a wish free, concerning you and Plone, I would wish, that you simply take a moment to think about, if you would say the things you write, also into a person's face. If you would call modules to be trash or s.th. similar, if you'd stand in front of the module's author, also?

I have a huge admiration for you in many points, not only for the professional expertise, and at the same time, I struggle with the damaging result on Plone, when the digital medium seems to let you loose your good manners, which you have undoubtly in the real world.

-ida

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I replied yesterday by email but obviously the incoming email feature of community.plone.org does not work...anyway.

Big cinema for an unfortunate typo and lots of constructed and pretended allegations.

Lessons learned from discussions about diversity, CoC, gender affairs, political correctness, gender mainstreaming etc. in the context of last EuroPython 2014 (where I was handling the complete outside communication): no chance to argue and discuss in a reasonable way against such allegations (independent of their correctness). The question is not about CoC, diversity etc. itself, it's about how these concepts are applied in many cases as kill argument.

And I won't comment any further on this issue where a mouse is turned into an elephant - especially because I know Ida and worked with here closely together for some time.

Andreas

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Email posting indeed seems to be non-functional. Here's the reply I thought I added via email yesterday:

Like Paul, I had not noticed the offending "community" post. I also plead email clutter (I read the community forum by email).

If on this, or any other issue, you -- or anyone else -- believe we haven't handled a diversity policy related issue well, please let the Plone Foundation know: board@plone.org. I assure you that it will be taken seriously. We are willing to act formally or informally, as necessary.

The board has already been involved in trying to improve the climate on forums. We have banned one individual from IRC and asked that person to stay away from forums where they might encounter new users.

Let me also add that at the Strategic Summit I understand it was listed as a high priority to improve community diversity. Interest in this is very general and widespread. We want to do well.

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Hm, I just replied via web-UI, re-edited and saved. The message is gone...

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Oh ok an admin told me why, he wants to reassure an privacy-info is not accidentally published, of which I think it's no secret, but I understand.

Also I have to correct myself: I had been informed to have granted admin-perms, just wasn't asked before.

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Hi martior, let's just leave my last post deleted and get some peace for production.
But as of talking of diversity, I'd like to drop a link here to the very first quer-tech-conf in the world, on 8th of May in Berlin:
http://www.unit-festival.com/
And a pointer to the interested, when it comes to rising awareness: You'll find plenty of inspiration on WomanAgainstFeminism :wink:
Cheers, Ida

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Hi Ida,

It's good to hear from you again—I always appreciated your thoughtful suggestions, which often landed on things I'd missed or forgotten. I am sorry this happened to you and commend your courage in bringing them to light.

Please know that I will not accept or participate in any sort of discrimination or bullying.

(Ida, as you did this, this next part is not meant toward you:) I encourage anyone who feels they have been subject to discrimination or bullying or any other issue which causes them to feel unwelcome in the Plone Community, to tell several someones—the only thing that's certain is that nothing will ever be done if someone doesn't know about it.

As I write this, it occurs to me—as I see a magnet near my office door announcing it as a safe space for LGBTA people—that in several places where I've worked, there has been either an equal opportunity person/team to whom issues can be reported, or a way (like my magnet) to identify persons who support equal opportunity. I wonder if something of this nature is needed—to be clear, I'm thinking out loud (albeit in a public forum), as I have not talked with a single person about this or spent more than two minutes thinking about implications and unintended consequences.

Ida, I hope to see you around soon, or whenever/if-ever you return.

Christina