[Zope] Thanks

Michael R. Bernstein webmaven@lvcm.com
21 Oct 2001 23:48:55 -0700


On Sun, 2001-10-21 at 09:37, Andrew Kenneth Milton wrote:
> Due to the sheer volume of personal attacks I have received from
members
> of this list over the past three days, I find myself in somewhat of a 
> predicament.
> 
> These emails have been rather upsetting to me, and while I'm normally
> fairly thick skinned about such things, this has simply gone too far. I
> now find myself dreading reading my email, and that is unacceptable.

It *is* unacceptable. If I were you, I would be strongly considering
making these emails public.

> I am bracing for a new round of the same once the digest goes out,
> hopefully the percentage of cowards is somewhat less in the digest 
> userbase than the live userbase.
> 
> I'm have unsubscribed from the mailing lists, and therefore I guess I 
> invalidate my previous request for a new one.

Andrew, I hope that you resubscribe in the future.

Anyone who has attacked you privately should be ashamed of themselves.
No matter how much you disagree with someones views, telling them (or
threatening them) to shut up is *never* an appropriate response. In
fact, since they chose not to attack you in full view of the rest of
this list (so to speak) they probably *are* ashamed of themselves.

Now, I've been a part of this community for quite a while, and my
activity level has fluctuated a great deal. I've done a bit of
hand-holding for others, I've both asked and answered questions. I put
my job on the line once to promote Zope as a solution for an Intranet. I
want the community to continue to grow, and for that growth to
accellerate.

It is now getting to be *too much work* to sort through the postings on
this and other lists. I find that I'm confining more and more of my
reading to zope-dev@zope.org and the more specialized lists such as
zpt@zope.org. But even the volume of zope-dev alone is too much for me
to keep up with and read every posting.

I want more specialization. I want specialization by subject, I want
specialization by skill-level, and I want specialization by audience.

When I'm in the mood to help someone out, I want it to be as easy as
possible to find a newbie and answer their question. When I'm in that
mood, the newbie questions are the wheat, and the rest are the chaff I
have to sort through. Right now it's getting to be more and more work to
sort whatever particular wheat I'm looking for just then from the rest
of the chaff. This *is not* elitism.

The Zope community needs to continue to grow, and the way to do that is
to allow it to diversify and specialize.

Let the flames begin.

Michael Bernstein.

P.S. private flames just *might* be made public