Failing drastically to cover everything because the "everything" includes mostly what goes on in the Perlmonks cb - which many Monks never speak in - this message will touch on the series of ongoing incidents partially documented here and will be brief and general, essentially a short list of conclusions which I have come to as a result of the events mentioned (and others unmentioned, too numerous to count).

Firstly, if the topic of the message isn't "Perlmonks, the Toy", the amount and duration of interest in it seems shockingly low. That's apparently because despite the reality that an unused piece of software has no value, the people at the Perlmonks site and whether they are happy, growing (learning), and not demoralized isn't on the radar screen of a kid fixated on playing with his toy (and making sure that he has to share it with as few people as possible).

Secondly, the demoralizing aspects of being at Perlmonks are worse than most people experienced even in the least pleasant high school experience many could recount. As a metaphor, say a teacher of a class completely fails to adhere to any code in terms of acting on a responsibility to keep order, and lets student-on-student bullying go unchecked. Say on top of that the teacher sides with certain students, perhaps for self-protection, and when she does exercize her institutionally-granted powers to coerce changes of behavior from students, she does so with complete caprice according to mood or demands of her posse. That's an example of a demoralizing environment in which learning is incredibly hampered; and that's Perlmonks.

Finally, to return to the concrete events mentioned, the are just a couple of pretty hard-core facts that don't boil down much further than what I can state here. One is that use of the term "troll" is the new "fag" or "abo" or "paki" - the word you can use that your mates will cheer you on for, and nobody will name you a flamer for.

Second is that two people with utlimately prominent roles in acting as police of the Perlmonks community are utterly unsuited for it. One does this quite regularly and the other I have not seen do it openly for a long time, but he can, and he has apparently got the most day to day control over the running of the site. The former person mentioned is Yves Orton (demerphq) and the latter is Tye McQueen (tye).

This needs to be made very clear: I don't want the kind of control powers over Perlmonks, the Toy, or over Perlmonks, the Community/Site, that Yves or Tye have. I am not dispositionally suited for it (that means it would be a poor match for my gifts and weaknesses). So everything I am saying here is just what I believe that some future person will have to contend with as the first set of issues if they did decide to dedicate themselves to the improvement of Perlmonks, the Community.

Yves (demerphq) thinks it is fine to brandish threats over people and attempt to modify their behavior to his liking that way. Of course what this often results in is that exactly the same is returned to him. But he doesn't learn from it each time it happens. Also, to use a metaphor, imagine that a sheriff is called into a bar brawl at the Saloon. His method for dealing with it is to whip out his gun 10 seconds after arriving and shoot the first 3 people he lays eyes on after spinning around on his heel. Totally random, left absolutely up to chance. That is demerphq's strategy for keepin' the order and administrin' the justice at Perlmonks. It's actually worse than if there was no "sheriff" at all. Yves should voluntarily relinquish his power to either moderate or "borg" (prevent from chatting) today.

In Tye (tye)'s case, the simple ... uh, call it inability to learn or complete lack of the fundamental concepts that seem to be the case for Yves ... those simple deficits are apparently not the main thing. Tye is actually truly malicious. He conceived a vendatta towards me a number of years ago, and it has been ignored as well as possible by me until recently (again, see the WWW page referenced above). It's up to the reader to try to conceive of what could happen to create the best outcome for "Perlmonks, the Community" wrt Tye McQueen. Without a doubt many who have coded pieces of "Perlmonks, the Toy" and had Tye commit their changes are sure where their "loyalties lie". But this message is about the Community, not the Toy, and while I am sure that many people could and maybe will step up with shrill defenses against what they see as an unwarranted personal attack, the evidence for a lengthy pattern of unwarranted provocation, baiting, and general negativity by Tye towards certain individuals is simply unassailable. It sets the most demoralizing and iniquitous sociological standard for Perlmonks, the Community, that I can imagine. I have a new-found respect for those who can manage to claim a role of supervisorship over a community, and then not completely fail to exercize even modest effort in doing it. The "workmanship" ethic is the same whether you are building a desk or a school, I think, and I see no pride of workmanship in this regard from Yves Orton, whatever his code is like; and from Tye McQueen I see nothing but vicious insecurity-based vindictiveness.

    Soren Andersen Intrepid