> On Jun 4, 2018, at 3:30 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On 06/04/2018 01:46 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> "Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
>>> On 06/03/2018 11:29 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>>> We are now asking for a final round of community comments.
>> Actually, it's intentional that we are not saying that. The idea is
>> that any interaction between PG community members is subject to the CoC,
>> whether it takes place in postgresql.org infrastructure or not, so long as
>> there is not another CoC that takes precedence (such as a conference's
>> CoC). The reason for this is an unfortunate situation that took place in
>> the FreeBSD community awhile back [1], wherein one community member was
>> abusing another via Twitter, and their existing CoC failed to cover that
>> because it had been explicitly written to cover only community-run forums.
>> So we're trying to learn from that mistake, and make sure that if such a
>> situation ever came up here, the CoC committee would have authority to
>> act.
>
> O.k. I can see that. The problem I am trying to prevent is contributor X being disciplined for behavior that has nothing to do with PostgreSQL.Org. I am not sure what the exact good solution is for that but it is none of our business if contributor X gets into a fight (online or not) with anyone who is not within the PostgreSQL.Org community.
That can be a problem when people who are known by some to be toxic join a community, and those who have previous experience with them leave. That can leave them as a "missing stair" or, worse, if they continue to be horrible but within moderation guidelines they can provoke responses from other participants that can cause them to be moderated or be chastized and then leave. In some cases that has caused the entire culture to drift, and pretty much destroyed the community.
(Community management is hard. The more you formalize some of it the more you have to formalize all of it and do so near-perfectly. Developers, who tend to prefer hard black/white, true/false rules rather than leaving some decisions to personal judgement can be some of the worst people at doing community management, and some of the easiest to manipulate.)
Cheers,
Steve