I think it's important to keep things in perspective, and not to overreact.
If you were treated this way consistently by someone, and the community defended that person rather than calling them out on their poor behavior, would you continue to volunteer? Do you expect staff to continue working under the same conditions?
Best case you'll get is staff members that tune out the jerks. Of course, when the prevailing culture breeds this type of behavior, you'll get lots of staff tuning out lots of jerks. It isn't a viable community.
What seems to have happened here, is that one action has broken many (all?) links to Mailman archives. That, in my book, is a mess. The question was, to that someone who made the mess, what his plan was to clean it up.
Again with the phrasing. Cut it out.
You realize that Daniel is the only person who's deleted posts that has even given the slightest care to the fact that the links break, right? This happens all the time and until today we just broke the links.
If you really want to fix this problem, fix mailman, or write a sane system.
What should happen right now is *cleaning up the mess*. The more time is spent in butthurt and drama, the more *new* mess there is to clean up, once the old mess is cleaned up.
This thread is about the culture of aggressive behavior that we breed and accept. I'm tired of accepting it. As I called out MZ, I'm going to call you out too. Your behavior in this post is unacceptable.
As far as I can see the easiest wat to go about this, is to dig up backups, salt the messages that originally needed to be "deleted" with spaces or *** or whatever (and add a note to the effect of "this was done because of *reason*), and then rebuild the archives so the permalinks are not broken anymore.
And then go in and fix whatever permalinks were fixed in the meantime.
This needs to happen fast. Once it's been done, there's all the time in the world for recriminations and drama and new guidelines and rules of conduct and whatnot.
Why does this matter so much? This is like the 27637862487 time that links have been broken due to the exact same action. It isn't the end of the world. It would be ideal if it was repaired, but it's not a dire emergency.
- Ryan