Threatening emails from Jeff Atwood

Question

I just received the following threat in private email from Jeff Atwood.

I have no intention of corresponding privately with Mr Atwood, so I reproduce his message here.

Mr Atwood starts with a greeting "Hi Robin". His bogus familiarity is neither deserved nor welcome. He accuses me of leaving multiple comments. I do not leave multiple comments. I write comments one at a time and end by pressing the "add comment" button. Mr Atwood also accuses me of protesting. I presume what Mr Atwood is referring to is the fact that since September the commenting system has been malfunctioning. When one proceeds to a new line the system inputs what one has already entered even though one has not pressed the "add comment" button. This behaviour interferes with my natural and intuitive method for entering text. I did try to change my ways to fit in, but I am a creature of habit and I keep pressing enter without being conscious of it. Moreover this peculiar behaviour is not explained in the math.stackexchange faq, so comes as a total surprise to users.

When I raised this point in meta, I was directed to this thread from which I learnt that this undocumented change in behaviour was deliberate sabotage from the SE hierarchy and the majority opinion is that it is undesirable. So Mr Atwood, please repair this vandalism and ensure that only the "add comment" button submits the comment.

That said, there have been other instances of vandalism from the SE hierarchy, notably the sabotage of the CW system. A questioner can no longer tick the CW box; if he/she wants the thread CW he/she must entreat the moderators; this is a waste of their time.

Also Mr Atwood equates my comments to "noise" and "harm"; this is gratuitous abuse. He also alleges that moderators need to "clean up" after me. There is no need for the moderators to do anything.

I take no pleasure in writing posts like this. All I want to do here is to read and write mathematics. I do find the smooth running of the site suffers from apparently capricious decisions taken far away from math.stackexchange.

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Hi Robin,

Please do not intentionally leave multiple comments as a form of protest on http://math.stackexchange.com (or the meta site). Your feelings on this matter have been duly noted; vandalizing the site to prove a point is not helping.

• it creates noise on the site, harming the experience for the community
• it creates needless work for moderators who have to clean up

If you continue to do this, your account will be placed in timed suspension.

Thanks,

Jeff

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Added (9/12/2010) I append a further email from Mr Atwood. Note that despite his attempts to moderate his tone, his threats continue. Can I ask Mr Atwood to cease spamming my private email, to fix the self-induced problems with the commenting system, and not to throw around bogus accusations of harm.

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Hello,

I apologize if you found my previous email offensive, it was not intended to be offensive. Let me try again.

I have no issues at all with your overall behavior on math.se, the only specific issue I have is with the multiple incomplete comments you've been entering over the last two months or so. I have manually merged all of your comments together, and I documented some of the community reaction to your incomplete comments here:

http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/1289/threatening-email-from-jeff-atwood/1291#1291

Intentionally and repeatedly entering multiple incomplete comments instead of a single complete comment is harmful to the community, and sets a bad example for everyone.

I respectfully ask you to refrain from this behavior in the future, otherwise further action -- including timed suspension -- will be necessary on my part.

Thanks,

Jeff

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Answer 1

I am not sure I should be wading into this at all, but here goes:

In my opinion neither Jeff Atwood nor Robin Chapman is behaving well on this issue. They are both talking past each other and using highly pointed, rhetorical language.

Robin Chapman's message above is tagged with "sabotage", "threats" and "abuse-of-power": these are not the tags of calm, reasonable discussion. He characterizes the (relatively) recent change regarding the return key and comments as "deliberate sabotage" on the part of the SE administration. What he means, I think, is that it is not a bug but a deliberate change which a vast majority of users who have weighed in on the issue have expressed dissatisfaction with. But that's not the same as sabotage: while I admit to not understanding in the slightest why this change in the comments has been made (and I have accidentally hit return once or twice myself and not been pleased by the result), I'm sure that the SE people who did felt that it was, somehow, an improvement. That their goal is to sabotage their own software is not very credible.

I also think that a world-renowned mathematician, problem-solver and game-show winner like Robin Chapman probably does in fact have it in his ability to learn not to hit return at the end of each line of his comments. At least he could try, and if he fails he could edit together his comments. If he's not able and willing to do this, he doesn't make for an optimal moderator candidate, and this was the point behind the question I asked on this.

Conversely, Jeff Atwood is using very loaded, rhetorical language as well, and seems entirely too fixated on what should be for both parties a minor issue. I was recently contacted privately by Robert Cartaino asking for my opinion on certain aspects of the site, who cc'ed the email from Jeff Atwood suggesting that he contact me. I gave a long and detailed reply to both of them. I was very disappointed to receive a superficial, sarcastic reply from Jeff Atwood shortly thereafter. When I wrote back to say that he needn't contact me further unless he was serious about having a conversation, he responded by thanking me for my contribution and then wrote:

What's not serious or rational about pointing out that Robin Chapman, who [sic] you yourself singled out as an example of a community member with "decades" of experience, regularly engages in disrespectful, anti-community vandalism?

Well, where do I start? "Vandalism" is ridiculous: this terminology is unwarranted even if Robin's behavior were deliberate and malicious. But Robin has said that it is accidental, and I see no reason to believe otherwise. (This is not inconsistent with what I said before. People can do a lot of things by accident that they could avoid doing if they put their mind to it.) I don't see how it is "anti-community", since not a single community member has come forward and said they are bothered by his behavior (except me in this message, a little bit, but it's certainly no big deal). And by "disrespectful", I think Jeff Atwood can only mean disrespectful to him.

I have tried to make the point several times that Mr. Atwood seems to be conflating "community standards" with his own personal standards, and that this is disheartening to many and detrimental to community participation. In fact when I received an email which was, in essence [i.e., not a direct quote but a paraphrase] What's wrong with you people? You are so vocal in your critique and yet you refuse to participate in the democratic process! I explained the reasons why I myself did not have confidence that being a moderator would allow me to make any real difference on the site, this sort of thing being exactly what I had in mind. Suppose that I become a moderator and that two weeks from now Mr. Atwood suspends Professor Chapman for recalcitrant repeated rehitting of return. I would be strongly against this and (let us suppose) see that the majority of vocal users of the site feel the same way. So what do I do then? Take the matter up with Jeff Atwood? No thank you. He has not taken me seriously in our correspondence. (In fact, he has never even accepted my apology for an unwitting insult that I delivered, which is the one thing that I take somewhat personally.) Is it so hard to understand why I and others want to limit our involvement?

Answer 2

For example, in Some questions about the gamma function --

Perhaps by the time you've pressed enter 3 times, and created 3 comments, you might realize that you've "accidentally" done this.. again.. as you add a fourth comment?

I was willing to overlook this for a week or so as you adapted -- but weeks later this is still an ongoing problem. That we don't have with any other user on any other site in our network, I might add. Across 500,000+ different users.

As I said in my email:

Your feelings on this matter have been duly noted; vandalizing the site to prove a point is not helping.

• it creates noise on the site, harming the experience for the community
• it creates needless work for moderators who have to clean up

I'm sorry you see this as a threat, when I see it as a simple

Please do not litter!

sign.

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edit: I'm going through and manually merging all the Robin Chapman comments on math.se, I want to record some of the comments responding to his comments as I do so (I delete these afterwards, since after the comments are merged, it's no longer relevant.)

Mapping that takes unit circle to unit circle

@Robin Chapman: Why are your comments breaking! – Chandru1

Kernel of the tangent map

@Robin Chapman : I asked a question on the meta site about the way I typographically see your comments: meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/787/… Do YOU see your own comments posted properly? [Can anybody else answer this question?] – Pierre-Yves Gaillard

Number of isomorphism types of functions f:[n]->[n]

@Robin: I really don't mean to complain, but it would be easier to read if that was all in a single comment. You can edit a just posted comment instead of adding another one, if you for example posted it by accident by hitting return. (Doesn't the "at most one comment per 15 seconds" blocking drive you insane when you write multiple comments like that, by the way?!?) – Hans Lundmark (3 upvotes)

Number of isomorphism types of functions f:[n]->[n]

Robin, I wonder - why do you keep splitting your comments over several lines? – M.B.

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/8911/how-to-prove-that-t-is-the-0-operator-that-is-tv0-for-all-u-v-in-v/8914#8914

@Robin: please, stop making comments on several lines! You can use shift+return if you want a newline in your comment. (though it doesn't display it properly). – Djaian

When is a graph planar?

@Robin: you should really start using that "edit" link when you accidentally hit the enter key too soon... – SamB

Some questions about the gamma function

@Robin there is no need to press enter after you reached the end of the input box. The website will automatically wordwrap based on the screen of the viewer. – alexanderpas

A few other issues with this intentional multi-commenting, beyond -- as previously mentioned -- the obvious readability problems, and the work it creates for myself and other moderators:

• each comment can be voted up independently, leading to comment fragments when comments > 5
• each comment is a separate notification in the global inbox of the post owner
• comments may be fragmented even with no votes, if comments > 5

Answer 3

I admit I'm baffled by the whole situation. I can't figure out why the SE team won't undo this unpopular "feature" or even explain why it's there, and I can't figure out why Prof. Chapman is claiming his behavior isn't meant as a protest, given that after an accidental hit of enter you could edit that comment instead of entering another comment.

More generally, there were a bunch of SE2.0 things that I was confused about initially which now all make sense to me due to one simple observation:

When the "community" is mentioned in the setting of SE they don't mean the x.SE community they mean the whole SE community (which is to say, the SO community).

This explains why sites are rolled out based on how much interest they have to SO users, this explains why policy is standardized across all sites, this explains why sites don't have their own administrators, etc. I think this is actually a reasonable decision on the part of the SE team who are trying to grow a coherent network rather than a series of separate sites.

Anyway the reason I bring all of this up is that people need to understand that they're not going to do comments one way here and another way at SO. The new SE2.0 system is intended to be largely uniform so that people can easily move from site to site and understand how everything will behave. It doesn't matter if 100% of the users of math.SE want the comments enter feature changed, if the SO community doesn't want it then it'll be the same thing here as there.

Answer 4

Prof. Robin Chapman states that he has the habit of hitting return key when he reaches the end of each line. This indeed seems to be true. A short google search would yield his posts at numerous mathematical websites with this same feature.

So,

Please do not intentionally leave multiple comments as a form of protest on http://math.stackexchange.com (or the meta site). Your feelings on this matter have been duly noted; vandalizing the site to prove a point is not helping.

seems to be a sad misunderstanding and

If you continue to do this, your account will be placed in timed suspension.

seems to be an over-reaction to something that is mostly a bearable inconvenience. The quality of his answers is such that it is more than worth the bother. It would be quite a tragedy to suspend such a valuable contributor for something that is not a major crime. I hope the powers-be wouldn't take such an extreme step.

That said, it would be great if prof. Chapman is willing to modify the writing habits. Then again, as I said above, I wouldn't press on the issue if he is really set in his ways.

Answer 5

Just another example of what we're talking about from the Some questions about the gamma function Question:

^{(that's 9 consecutive comments)}

Note that the comments do have edit functionality, and the indicator below the comment box clearly states how many more characters fit into the comment.

Also, the internet is paragraph based, not line based, allowing each user to view the internet on the width they like the best. If your device supports only 42 characters in with, the internet can wrap your paragraphs seamlessly to it; if your device supports 314 characters in width, it will still wrap seamlessly; no need to press the enter anywhere, unless you actually want to "enter" the information (or create a new paragraph, where supported).

Answer 6

A proposed compromise

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Jeff Atwood suggested a workaround at this recent post. The issue seems to be a global issue that must be decided for thousands of users on dozens of websites all at once. So we can't expect a quick assent from them. While Mr. Atwood didn't yet fix the issue, he has at least suggested a workaround. We also have to be pragmatic and make adjustments.

Is it possible that everyone who is bothered by this CR-enters-comment feature/bug compromises by using the suggested greasemonkey script circumventing the issue?

Edit: Bill Dubuque notes below that the script was originally written by KennyTM at this post, for mozilla firefox. Thanks a lot to KennyTM too.