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Comment by hartator | Hacker News Reader

For maintaining a small OSS tool, it's true that most of the people are rude.

Posting a "don't work with Windows" without any thing more. When asked for a backtrace or an explanation, copy/paste without formatting or anything else. Demanding for a feature without making a case for it. Not using any polite or nice phrasing in a thread.

I don't know the best to react to this. Maybe we should just close their issues without any explanation with just a link to a guideline or something. But, when you care about your project, you tolerate the abuse because you truly want to make your project better despite it.

It's like the rude kid of the article suggesting a new rule, but you actually find it's not that a bad of idea and deserve some thoughts into it.

It's hard to draw a line.

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I think closing an issue with a link to a post guideline is in order. Have in the guideline that "any post closed with a link to this thread may be resubmitted, provided offending commentary is left out" etc

I don't run any OSS projects myself, but I can't imagine anyone would fault you if you called-out people who demonstrate the behavior you're describing. If not a direct response to their rudeness, maybe a request that they comply with some basic guidelines when posting issue (guidelines you'd of course have to post).

I think this gets you unquestionable justification for declining to respond to rude questions, but it also serves as declaring norms for people who may just be ignorant to OSS norms (or even regular social norms).

> Demanding for a feature without making a case for it. Not using any polite or nice phrasing in a thread.

In virtually every case where I have seen impolite issues filed or even abusive issues filed, the biggest success has always been when the project maintainers simply ignore the abuse and respond respectfully, as if the request had been worded more politely. The abusive issue opener will often apologize for their tone or simply adopt a different, much more friendly tone.

This is an effective strategy. In the same way that people filing issues need to remember that maintainers are people and should be treated as people, maintainers can also remember that people filing issues are people.

There's no need to act adversarially in open source software development.

I'm not sure I agree that is a successful way. In most cases, the person either remains abusive, or doesn't post anything else.

I think the best thing to do is to just delete all abuse.

Sometimes I think every issue submission form should be a multi-page wizard that starts with a few questions, like “Do you understand that this software is being maintained by people in their spare time, free of charge, and will you promise to be civil in your requests? Agree/Cancel”, before they can even reach an insta-complaint text field.

As long as you're not paying the party producing $software, I don't think it should matter whether they're doing it in their spare time, or during job hours, or as their primary task. You're benefiting from their work. For free. Behave.

Not that you shouldn't behave if you're paying for the work, but in that case you can expect more investigatory work from the providing party.

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