Re: I resigned in 2004
Carsten Leonhardt <leo@debian.org> writes:
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
>> The general principle that I would advocate for here, though, is that
>> if someone says clearly and explicitly "never contact me again," we
>> should do what we can to never contact them again.
> If the message would be signed I'd agree, but for a non-signed message
> that would open abuse potential. I wouldn't like to find out I've been
> retired from Debian because someone faked a message like that in my
> name...
This theoretically could happen, but in practice using some basic
intuition while reading the message will, I think, reduce the chances to
nearly zero. For instance, the original reply did not feel like the kind
of thing someone would forge (it's too specific, too emotional, and too
full of easily falsifiable details), not to mention that it's hard to
figure out a motive for someone to forge such a message from someone who
had been inactive in Debian for a long time.
Also, if that does happen, it's remediable later, as Wouter points out.
We're not going to do anything completely irreversible.
"Never contact me again" is what one is supposed to tell someone if they
feel like they're being harassed. It's the sort of thing that I do think
we want to try to honor unless we have some reasonable reason to believe
that something weird is going on. I think it's highly unlikely that
anything good for anyone will ever come out of sending another message to
someone who says that.
To be very clear, I'm not saying this to defend the rudeness of the reply,
or to say that anyone did anything wrong by following our normal MIA
process. Just advocating for a change in procedure in the future if
someone sends that type of reply.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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