Sorry, I couldn’t follow that. I said that the real mystery is why his post remained hidden. And the answer to that is that a specific mod deliberately left it hidden, gave a user a surreal reply about “why”, and stonewalled (didn’t reply at all) when Guido asked them. In the meantime, the ongoing hiding was creating needless drama on external sites.
I’m unclear on what you’re talking about. The original topic post said nothing about deadlines. There was a deadline later, but only after Guido’s suggestion to hold off didn’t get traction, and Guido himself pushed a proposal with a deadline to vote on. There was no deadline of any kind in play at the time Guido posted.
We have years of experience with this. Guido thinks elections are vital, but has (well, had) no interest in election theory, and has little patience for discussions about election methods, finding them generally time-consuming in an area where relating personal anecdotes has little objective value toward reaching a resolution. He wouldn’t find any such stuff persuasive in the slightest.
So of course he wanted to wait until I could chime in. But he wasn’t going to argue about it. They would take his suggestion or not. They didn’t. So he did the next best thing, to minimize the total time he had to devote to it: get over his disinterest in election theory and drive the topic to a conclusion himself.
Note that even though I was banned, @gpshead posted a brief statement on my behalf endorsing the “bloc STAR” method anyway. Like it or not, my view of these things carries a lot of weight, due to years of serious engagement.
Which Guido leveraged in the background, to pick my brain via email to educate himself sufficiently to conclude for himself that “bloc STAR” was the best choice. Which he did push to adoption, without mentioning my covert role. Fine by me! Far as both of us went, the goal was to get a better election method adopted with as little bother as possible.
I’ll note that @ClayShentrup also helped. He’s a world leading expert on STAR, and engaged with Guido in a related topic.
And @larry also helped, by elaborating on what his own Python voting library does. He’s another who picked my brain over email when he was developing that code. He didn’t mention me either. Also fine.
My actual influence on the PSF’s election history is hard to overstate, and Guido knew that. The credit for the PSF’s original “block Approval” method, though, belongs to David Mertz.
He won’t. He won’t agree with you either, though. This isn’t a kind of topic he’ll say anything more about in public. He’s very protective of his time. Which is why he pushed the election-method topic to a conclusion himself to begin with.
But he was one of the earliest readers of my blog post, and if he had reason to object to any part of it, he wouldn’t have been shy about telling me in private.
I never mentioned “instantly”, or any other quantification, because I don’t know how long it remained hidden. It did remain hidden “long enough” for external sites to notice and start whipping up drama over it. That in itself is a bad thing for the PSF. While the mods may not have known about that, Guido and I certainly did, because “the press” was asking us about it. We did the “damage control”.
You said you read my blog post? Judge Dredd very plainly told their questioner that the matter was settled, was not open to further discussion, and that any further questions should be addressed to the CoC WG’s email address instead.
I see no reason to believe that “a team” was even at work here, just Judge Dredd acting on their own and declaring the matter over. The other mod Guido contacted did act at once, because to their eyes the hiding was unwarranted. But by that time Guido was also able to tell the other mod about the useless drama the hiding was causing the PSF, and about the time of his own being wasted trying to prevent more bad publicity.
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In which case the PSF would have suffered much worse external publicity. You can’t possibly imagine that the PSF’s image could escape without major damage if it censored the language’s creator merely for posting a polite and considered mild suggestion in a topic of direct interest to relatively few people in the world (those who can vote in Steering Council Elections)…
I too would prefer that.
In my long experience with him, David is always worth listening to. A real advantage to seeing him talk is that his calmness and reasonableness are apparent. His writing can come across as the opposite, but he’s still actually a peach even when spraying 30-syllable words at the speed of light at high imagined volume 