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The Debian project has suffered from a long string of negative events recently, ranging from severe discontent over the inclusion of systemd, to talk of forking the project, to a grave bug affecting the important 'wine' package, to the resignation and reduced involvement of long time contributors.
The latest strife affecting Debian revolves around a request for a Debian package of the GPC-Slots 2 software. This request has been rejected with little more than an ad hominem attack against the software's author.
In response to the request, Stephen Gran wrote,
This is code by someone who routinely trolls Debian. I doubt we want any more poisonous upstreams in Debian, so I at least would prefer this never get packaged.
Jonathan Wiltshire proceeded to mark the request as 'wontfix', and closed it.
While Debian does strive to maintain high standards regarding the software it packages, the negative and personal nature of this rejection, without any apparent technical or licensing concerns, appears to conflict with Debian's own Code of Conduct. Such a personal attack could be seen as contradictory to the Code of Conduct's mandate that Debian participants "Be respectful", "Be collaborative", and most importantly, "Assume good faith".
Given its recent troubles as of late, many of them concerning the poor treatment of Debian developers and users alike, can Debian really afford to get embroiled in yet another negative incident?
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Monday November 24 2014, @11:45AM
Its not your fault, and I for one am glad you replied and read through the thread (this is the best thing an editor can do). I have nothing but respect for the people who spend their time to keep this website going.
However, I feel you read the replies wrong. It is not that we are interested (any non AC poster that posted above can mention his or her disagreement to this statement below). Over 90% of the post here are a discussion between a few subscribed people and the same AC. Even people who see through him get tricked into a discussion. I think most of us would prefer to discuss something more worthwhile than gpc-slots. Its a typical trollfest.
Using sites such as SN for a hate war is becoming more common. It is quite hard to prevent, Especially if they are as persistent as MikeeUSA seems to be. Its smaller sites and forums that are more vulnerable to this kind of attack, and I have personally seen it get out of hand.
The good thing that can come from this is a discussion about how to deal with this type of post. Personally, I would request for cautiousness in accepting stories from ACs that seem inflammatory, as you may be "used". Secondly, although not perfect, slashcode could put an unique hash on an ip (perhaps only visible for editors). Of course this can be defeated as pointed out above. But anything that slows people like this down is worthwhile.
But I would prefer that the staff discuss this internally and sets guidelines how to deal with this, not all of which needs necessary to be known publically (simply to make it more difficult to defeat said policy).
Interesting slightly relevant tidbit: I once wrote a small script that "fingerprinted" forum messages using bzip2. Similar data compresses better, so given a large sample of writing of someone I could say with reasonable accuracy whether a certain post was written by the same person or not. I was able to unmask a troll with a double account. With some practice, you can however defeat this easily, so its not a real solution either (besides, most SN posts are a bit too short for it).
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Monday November 24 2014, @01:06PM
Thanks. I found the 'esr' link interesting too. MikeeUSA has been around for quite a while it seems and he is unpopular in most of the places that he and I are both likely to frequent. Hence his choice of AC when submitting what I believe to be his own story. I will look out for him in the future and will happily view any subsequent submissions that might be from him in an entirely different light.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @01:08PM
It's beginning to feel a lot like Slashdot over here!
Nutters such as yourself are incorrectly claiming that all ACs are the same person.
Then you claim that there are "hate wars" and "conspiracies" going on, when there obviously aren't.
And now there's this nonsense about your comment "fingerprinting" script using bzip2 compression ratios?!
Hilarious!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @04:48PM
Shut up MikeeUSA, no one gives a damn!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @10:53PM
My bzip2 comment fingerprinting script has positively identified you as MikeeUSA. So you need to shut up, based on your own request to yourself.