Closure of issue #906

[Nils Steinger]

Dear cketti,

dear all,

I would like to voice my concern about how the recent comment influx on issue #906 (Add option for default display format) was handled.

In particular, I would like to encourage a reevaluation of the end result.

The story in a nutshell: a new Github user named "anonymous73" expressed their discontent about the lack of progress on implementing a force-plaintext switch for the email view. They used some strong language and the thread devolved into a discussion of an alternative MUA.

Team member (and current lead) cketti stepped in, warned all participants of the conversation to stop posting off-topic comments, and marked the existing comments as off-topic (and thus hidden by default).

An unpleasant episode, but understandable so far.

Unfortunately, this action prompted two more (somewhat heated) replies from anonymous73.

In response, cketti decided to lock the entire issue against further comments (except from team members).

I fear that this may be excessive. It can send a deterring signal to newcomers, stifle further contributions, and leave an overall questionable expression of how disputes are handled in the K-9 developer community.

Would it be agreeable to reopen the issue to the general public for constructive input (if and when it arises), and to seek a separate solution with (or for, if need be) anonymous73?

I do understand that moderating issue comments requires time and effort that could be put to use elsewhere, but I am firmly convinced that open-source projects benefit from user-contributed ideas, especially during their long-term advancement.

Please try to keep this community open.

Kind regards,

Nils Steinger / n-st

[philip]

Firstly your title is wrong. It is not closed. It is locked. So that's
rather misleading. It would still be a good feature to have.

The constructive input at this point would be a PR and there's nothing
stopping anyone, including anonymous73 from submitting such a PR.
Everyone knows what the feature request is. We don't need more comments
on the problem or what it fixes or anything else in order to implement
it.

GitHub is there to report bugs/enhancements and ensure the developers
have enough info to fix them and manage the code. That is all.

So we are losing very little other than 'Me too' comments by locking it.

We also have only two ultimate options when it comes to moderating
issues:

1. Lock the issue.
2. Prevent the person from interacting at all with the project. This
*includes* forking it.

The spirit of open source means we try our absolute best not to do
number 2.

Locking an issue is extremely common across open source projects on
GitHub especially when issues descend into acrimony.

So no, I don't think unlocking the issue is a solution or a particularly
big slight on the openness of the community. Also as I said there's
little to add to the issue at this point - a PR is the next step.

For what it's worth I'm not sure that K-9 has a great user feedback path
either, but with a handful of active developers at any one time and one
core maintainer it's just not practical to do anything else. I wish the
app had loads of people willing to donate time to the project in
community management but it doesn't. And GitHub is not a good discussion
forum. If people wanted to take that on they could look at options for
forums or communities etc (e.g. a K-9 subreddit).

Doing more community management is also a waste of time if there's no
developers to do the sweeping changes wanted.

Personally speaking, I've basically moved away from Android for my
personal device myself hence my sharp decline in activity. I might get
to do some more by borrowing a work but it's not that likely.

Regards,

Philip Whitehouse

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