Harald,
For whatever it is worth, I'll add a few things to this, largely
as corollaries to you one-line summary, without commenting on
what fraction of Dean Anderson's postings (or yours) that I read:
--On Tuesday, 28 June, 2005 11:54 +0200 Harald Tveit Alvestrand
<harald(_at_)alvestrand(_dot_)no> wrote:
Since Nick Staff's response is edging towards the subject of
proper behaviour towards irritating people on the IETF list, I
thought it might be worthy of response.... I found no reason
to respond to earlier messages in this thread.
...
2 - When you think that other people behave unreasonably,
ignore their unreasonable behaviour unless your role requires
you to respond to it ("don't feed the troll"). Alternatively,
complain off-list. RFC 3005.
...
I've chosen to apply my strongest version of rule 2 to mr.
Anderson - I won't see his messages unless I look for them.
The reason being that I do not wish to expend my resources in
cooling down to the point where I'd only make reasonable
responses.
I think that's a good thing for people to do when they
discover that they have the same kind of reaction to mr.
Anderson's posts as I far too often have. So in the spirit of
rule 3, I have shared the information on what I'm doing.
...
Or, summarizing my advice in a very short sentence:
Killfiles are good for you.
(1) If one cannot read the comments of a particular individual
without an excessively high likelihood of responding in a heated
fashion, kill files are also good for the community. Overheated
responses and the type of positive feedback loops (and sometimes
flame wars) they tend to cause are of benefit to no one.
(2) That principle is symmetrical: if, e.g., Mr. Anderson or Mr.
Staff find your proposals irritating and of sufficiently low
information value to be worth quietly putting up with, they
would be doing themselves and the community a favor by filtering
your posting out.
(3) People who take on roles that pretty much require that read
even irritating postings, such as ADs and WG Chairs, assume a
dual responsibility to the community: one of them is to try to
read postings and extract the signal from the noise and the
other is to deal quietly and equitably with the noise. I.e., in
your terms, they are obligated to expend the energy to calm down
before responding and to respond only when that is really
relevant and useful.
And, for everyone, the corollary for everyone is that, if you
want your postings read, you should keep them calm and focused
on fact and logical reasoning and explanation.
john
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