"It's time for you to leave."

[Joel Rees]

On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 2:50 AM, Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:
> On 12/30/2011 05:28 AM, Craig White wrote:
>>
>> I think it's reasonable to presume contempt when you tell someone it's
>> time for them to leave.
>
>
> No.  Linda has severe issues that cause her to start new threads that have
> nothing to do with Fedora or Linux even and do nothing but waste everybody's
> time.  Not only that, she keeps dumping her issues into other threads,
> hijacking them and, again, wasting people's time.  This list is for tech
> support, not for discussing a member's delusions and if she can't accept
> that, she doesn't belong here.  Linda clearly needs help and I hope she gets
> it.  If and when she can behave herself here, she'll be welcome to return
> and I'll be glad to see it.

Some people don't know how to ask questions without going off-topic. I
seem to be one of them, myself.

It takes practice and experience to figure out how to approach the
list seamlessly. It takes being criticized. Sometimes it takes
sticking around in spite of being asked to leave.

I've spent my share of time on the openbsd lists. Very good lists if
you can learn to ride with the flow over there. I've seen them rail at
minor nuisances that this list puts up with every day. I've also seen
them say, "Don't let the door hit you on your way out." But that one's
for people who are already threatening to take their unwelcome
attentions and leave. I've also seen them turn around and help lots of
people who finally figured out the right questions to ask about the
problems they were having.

I don't want to see this list become an alt.religion.aliens newsgroup
or a misc at openbsd.org mailing list. Linda is kind of extreme. But she
is not telling us we all have to switch to distro Y or warning us how
Steve Ballmer is going to pull the fat out of the fire and then watch
out for Microsoft because of XYZ.

And the question of what happens when you plug six USB drives in,
well, we know better, hopefully she now realizes that's too much of a
good thing and not the way to do backup, but it does help us think a
bit about the edge cases we want to ignore.

If I worked HR for a company that wanted to start a Home Edition
commercial Linux OS product, I'd be looking for people like Linda to
help in the usability testing department. She can be a useful
influence here if we'll let her.

(And being useful is good therapy, but that's not really relevant here, is it?)

--
Joel Rees