[OSM-dev] Removing functionality and giving just No as answer

[Tom Hughes]

On 24/02/17 14:43, Blake Girardot HOT/OSM wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 12:33 PM, Dave F <davefoxfac63 at btinternet.com> wrote:
>
>> On 24/02/2017 11:19, Tom Hughes wrote:
>>
>>> Well it was a little odd that we suddenly got several people who are not
>>> regular commenters turning up in the space of a few minute to add "me too"
>>> style responses.
>>
>> What's wrong with that? There are numerous discussions in Dev that I have no
>> interest in, but on occasion there's something relevant to my OSM usage & I
>> will make a comment. This current topic appears to be relevant to a few
>> other users.
>>
>> OSM Github is not a private club. You should be welcoming other
>> contributors, not 'closing' on them.
>
> I second this 100%!
>
> If something is of interest to someone and they know other
> stakeholders who have similar use cases or the feature is important to
> them, getting them to actually contribute their input is really an
> invaluable opportunity for developers.

An issue tracker is not a general discussion board though, and there has 
to be some sort of limit to discussions there if we're not all going to 
be driven insane.

The people that were turning up in this case were not saying adding new 
information by saying "I use that to do X" where X was something new 
that nobody had mentioned before that might change the balance of 
whether it was worth doing but rather they were just asserting that they 
used the feature like the previous commenters - they were adding 
quantity to the discussion not quality.

I don't normally lock issues, so in the vast majority of cases people 
are welcome to comment on closed issues if they have some new 
information to add, and if that leads to a closed issue being reopened 
then that is fine.

I lock issues when people are continuing to post in a way which is not 
useful and doesn't add anything - restating a position over and over 
again without adding new information is not meaningful discussion and 
when that happens I may decide to lock the issue.

The alternative (to preserve my sanity) is that I simply unsubscribe 
from those issues and leave people to waffle on in an echo chamber but 
I'm not really sure that's better for anybody is it?

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://compton.nu/