[Puppet Users] Community: How to deal with attempts at sabotage

Hi all,

The underlying assumption of membership in any community is that your  
participation is at worst neutral, and if possible positive.   
Communities, online or off, generally do what they can to protect  
themselves from detrimental influences, which is where policies,  
politeness, moderators, and all that come into play.

Puppet's community has been both fortunate and awesome, in that it  
requires almost no moderation or control; we've only had to kick a  
couple of people out of our IRC channel and they were clearly just  
insane or spammers, and we've never had to remove anyone from our  
mailing list other than spammers.

We've recently had some problems where one or two people are  
maintaining their presence in the Puppet community solely as a way to  
recruit people out of Puppet and into their community, at the expense  
of ours, and I think we need a straightforward community policy on this.

Overlapping communities are awesome, and I'm all for your encouraging  
Puppet community members to join other communities *in addition to  
ours*, but it seems a bit insane for us to support people coming into  
our community just to evangelize competing products and communities.

My take is that if your participation in our community is *solely* for  
purposes of shrinking it by drawing people into your community at the  
expense of ours, then you should be kicked from our community.

What do others think?  Should it be acceptable to privately contact  
members of our community, encouraging them to leave?

-- 
Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.
     -- H. L. Mencken
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Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com


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