On May 16, 2008, at 11:14 AM, Carol Anne Ogdin wrote: > Your opinions are louder than your putative experience. > Unfortunately, in > 51 years in the computer industry, I've sometimes had to cope with > behaviors > like yours. It still makes me sad to experience such unhappy > people who > think that attack is the best way to enrich a collaboration. hmm. perhaps we should put some of that 51 years of experience to use in evaluating this particular situation? while i can't see inside your head, i can refer to the policies you yourself have published (http://www.deepwoods.com/transform/pubs/DDB.htm). The "core" participants can be identified by seeing how many other people ("core" or not) refer to them by name. The named people are the "core" group. Make sure you remain sensitive to their concerns, for they implicitly speak for the entire population of participants. by any definition, Karanbir is one of the core participants of this forum and of the CentOS project. have you lurked here a while? if so, i'm surprised you don't know this. on the CentOS website, please check Information->The CentOS Team->Members and see if some of those names look familiar. please treat him with the respect he is due. If the boundaries are not clearly established, differing expectations will ensure that somebody feels the boundaries have been crossed. That's why it's important to have some published guidelines for behavior. the CentOS project does, in fact, have such published guidelines for mailing lists, available here: http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=16 (that's Support->Mailing Lists off the main page). issues concerning posting and quoting are covered there, quite unambiguously. please respect the published guidelines of this forum, *as you yourself recommend*. Of course, the newcomer might immediately and inadvertently violate some local cultural norms, sort of like walking through the flower bed on the way to the front door. In this case, it's usually best to take the process of new party education off-line, into e-mail. Chastising people in public for not reading the published guidelines, or for doing something they shouldn't almost guarantees they'll never participate again. ok, make up your mind; which do you want to be? are you a "tentative participant" who doesn't know how to behave and needs to be acculturated to this forum's norms, or are you a seasoned professional with 117,000 messages worth of experience in community- building? if you're the first, please stop telling everyone else how to behave; if you're the second, please stop making newbie mistakes, since you should know better. thank you. -steve -- If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction. - Fabian, Twelfth Night, III,v