Does the Julia team (or JuliaHub if they can manage here) have a PR person/team ? If not I think the team should definitely get one(if possible).
It is extremely important to protect the community and those generous contributors but I think it would be much more useful to be done in a more subtle way than the directly pointing fingers way. Speaking directly may arise some unwanted tension and if it gets outside of this community, damage control will be next to impossible. Vlang creator was very extreme in replaying and blocking people (definitely not the case here where your comment was very respectful) and now there is whole a stigma around its community.
Sorry for being a little off topics, I hope you discuss this between yourselves (if not already did)
Thanks for the feedback and concern. I’ve split this post off as it is a bit meta/tangential. Julia doesn’t have a PR team—open source projects generally do not. JuliaHub (Julia Computing) does not moderate the Julia forums and it would be inappropriate for it to do so or for JC PR people to have moderation powers here.
We (discourse moderators) have been observing this situation and discussing it for over a day now. @mbauman did try the more subtle approach first of splitting one of the threads and dropping some weak guidance in doing so. But things have continued to escalate, so I felt that I should post something rather than not take any action. I am not pointing fingers at anyone or banning anyone. Nothing that anyone has done is cause for a ban. No one specific user is mentioned in my post and I think I made it fairly clear that I’m not certain what’s going on and am open to alternate explanations, but something is going on and people reading the thread deserve to be aware of that. We could continue to monitor this situation secretly, but in general, I’ve found that transparency, openness and directness where possible is a better approach.
“… But in Japan, India, Iran, South Korea, and—you guessed it—Russia, the smiling faces were considered significantly less intelligent. Even after controlling for other factors, like the economy, there was a strong correlation between how unpredictable a society was and the likelihood they would consider smiling unintelligent.”
The “Vlang creator” was just an extreme example, as I said your comment on the issue had multiple “benefit of doubt disclaimers” and anyone who reads here regularly already knows Julia in general has a friendly and fantastic community from core creators that are very responsive and contributors and whatnot helping newcomers.
To be honest after you posted I went and checked and saw a few accounts being created after march 21st started posting just on that post and understood why you took action. As Julia grows this kinda incident (either mischievous or a politic to increase traction) will occur more frequently. Hopefully we can manage.
The links are really on point, that’s why I asked if there exist PR or not. I think (as Stefan explained) it is too much to ask of an open source project to have a PR team (and even maybe against the Philosophy of open source?).
IMO it’s not really against the “philosophy of open source” (if there even is a consistent, agreed upon version of that - there are after all companies that open source their (paid!) products as well), but purely a problem of economics - open source doesn’t really make money and PR/community management very much does like to be paid, since it’s usually a very thankless job with high burnout rates. I think anyone who has tried to manage a public forum for a while can attest to that. This forum is/seems (luckily) very tame compared to the rest of the internet, with only occasional hickups (though I’m certainly not qualified to make any quantitive statements - this is purely my experience here).
