On issue queues, community support and rudeness

Joeri Poesen //

UPDATE 1: blogging when you’re in an extremely foul mood is a bad idea. Seriously.

UPDATE 2:
To those who were offended or felt otherwise targeted: I apologize. This article is not directed at you. It is a rant that attempts to describe a general situation that is, in my opinion, not an isolated one. Many, many leading Drupal community members are awesome, patient, courteous and helpful people.

UPDATE 3: Please read the follow-up On community interaction, lessons learned and plans to move forward: to put this article in perspective before commenting.

UPDATE 4: changed a fuck to an f to a fark. I don’t personally get the difference really. In my opinion a fark is just a hidden fuck and equally strong yet sneakily hidden under a cloak of innocence. However, Darrel seems to find it makes a world of difference, so if people feel that strongly about it, fark it is.

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I have a weird problem with a module. I talk to you, the maintainer. You agree it’s weird but state you don’t have time right now but encourage me to dig in and investigate. Which I do by debugging the crap out of it, line by line.

I find a clue and post my findings, but no response. I don’t complain, I’m sure you’re busy. I take another look at the issue queue and find a number of seemingly related bug reports. I point this out by commenting on a few issues.

Suddenly after a couple of days you start responding to the issues I commented on. You’re saying I’m annoying the fark out of you and that I should stop cross-posting.

Oh and I shouldn’t file a bug report without bothering to find out how something works in the first place and stop proposing unrelated solutions founded on things I don’t understand.

/me starts whimpering

Look, I’m sorry I annoyed you by helping out people the wrong way, but I’m not sorry I try to help others

I try to be careful in my wording and I say how I would solve a problem, or halve solved one; what I in my humble opinion think might be causing the problem.

I thought attacking issue queues and helping out people on d.o. was recommended as the best way to get involved in the community and learn the internals of Drupal. Don’t know where I got that silly idea.

I will refrain from adding noise to your issues and I won’t bother you again. You might want to check the Drupal handbook though. The guide to using your module and the code snippet I added there are most likely incompetently wrong and dreadfully confusing.