[Libreoffice-qa] Insulting comments in bug reports: what should we do?

[Alex Thurgood]

On 07/15/2012 05:51 PM, Roman Eisele wrote:

Dear Roman,

> In this comment, Urmas <davian818 at gmail.com> wrote:

> First I wanted to write to Urmas, but I then I wanted to ask you first
> what you all think what we should do. It is always difficult to built a
> working QA community, but easy to disturb or even to distroy it by such
> comments. Again: what do you think?
>

This is not an isolated incident from that person, and I was beginning 
to wonder myself whether he/she had other issues which might be coming 
to the surface through the comments made. Most of the ones I have seen 
from this person could be interpreted as highly aggressive and, yes, I 
would agree that some, especially the initial bug reporter, might take 
offence.

What might be done, however, is a difficult question to answer : perhaps 
a friendly and encouraging word from others here, reminding him/her that 
this is a community and that as such we are ultimately trying to help 
people and determine, at least for the bug triaging process, whether the 
reported behaviour is indeed a bug. I would also agree that personal 
attacks are unwarranted, on other lists and forums, a person could be 
banned for that outright by the admins or moderators.


I still feel it better to contact person directly, to try and understand 
why there is such apparent animosity, especially since we know nothing 
of their circumstances, and it is rather unfair to talk about what we 
should do in their absence (unless he/she is following this list).

I have a concern, however, that approaching Urmas in the gentle way 
might just lead to more trolling which would ultimately get us nowhere...


Alex