A rational tone doesn’t help because some of the worst trolls stay unemotional and try to get other people to lose their shit.
But you seem to imply that Contreras, not the PLC, might be the one possibly viewed as a "professional victim", because you said "a person" and not "an organization."
Doesn't your observation apply more strongly to the PLC?
If the PLC pointed to 100 emails, and Contreras responded to all of them, then is that worse for Contreras? Or worse for the PLC? (Clearly it depends on if you accept the presented information. But "right or wrong" means you're only looking at the length of the list.)
If the PLC pointed to 100 emails, and Contreras responded to 10 of them, then wouldn't the easy interpretation be that the other 90 were justified? (Ie, the 'Gish Gallop' mentioned twice.)
As to your second sentence, unfortunately an irrational or emotional tone also doesn't seem to help. I wouldn't put it past people to claim that's evidence of being a professional victim playing to readers' emotions.
I did not choose to make this a thing, it was a thing even before I was notified of the verdict.
Personally I don't see the need to make this a thing and involve the PLC. If Elijah Newren had a problem with me, he could simply ask me "please don't contact me in the next three months" and I would gladly do that.
Enforcement should be necessary only after other methods of agreement have failed. But Elijah never attempted to contact me, and the PLC did no attempt to do any mediation.
One day I was simply notified: this is your punishment. And that's that.
They are not going to solve their problems unless they generating this kind of communication. Fork, if need be.
Unpacking this kind of communication to understand all the details enough to have a confident sense of which one is right if there is a right one is difficult so almost everyone will use a ‘low information’ analysis of the situation which is that they are all wrong.
Ah, the poisonous administrative busywork doing nothing departments infecting developement projects...
My understanding is that that department has contributed 0 lines of code. Correct me if you have better numbers...
The author engaged in policing others himself. Perhaps a lesson? It will become a problem if code is hosted exclusively on Github.
And I didn't engage in tone policing myself. I'm perfectly fine with people disagreeing with each other using whatever tone they'd like.
There was a rough tone at some point, but that is what you get if people are passionate and in disagreement. A corporate COC can kill any passion instantly and isn't a solution.
Ah, the busywork doing nothing part of the project...
As if Open Source development didn't have enough self-inflicted wounds and needed more...
