Warn bago or revoke CVS access?

I am ok with doing either or both.

Wait, what?

Since when do we ban new contributors who are confused by the daunting labyrinth of hap-hazardly documented rules and guidelines for Drupal.org? I'm on d.o 24/7 and even I don't know all of the various policies.

The cited replies show him saying the rule is "weird", and though I have no basis of comparison with other projects, given how often confusion about our GPL-only policy comes up, I'm inclined to agree that it's at best unstandard. I'm fine with the current policy, mind you, and understand where it comes from, but we should not censor people from expressing opinions counter to it.

I am not about to read all of the replies from http://drupal.org/node/416022 but at least in the most recent couple he seems cordial; just genuinely confused at the various opinions and coming from a perspective that there ought to be a definitive 'decider' on things like this and there aren't. Again, this is the Drupal community being unstandard, not him.

The zero fiasco created a pain in the ass because of a bug in project module, not the act of creating a project itself. You can read attitude in the project description if you want to, but IMO he's just trying to flesh out what the guideline actually is since even long-term Drupal contributors on the other thread seem to be confused.

Won't fix, IMO. Banning a *contrubutor*'s account should be a very last resort, and only for the most rude, vile, disrespectful, soul-sucking people who are truly taking more away from the project then they'll ever possibly hope to give back in their lifetime. If he turns out to be one of those people, I'll gladly eat my words, but asking a few very reasonable questions doesn't get you there in my book, and i'm frankly quite shocked by the question. This kind of trigger-happy behaviour gives us a bad name.

if you are interested in my opinion.

1) I think that I never uploaded non GPL code to CVS and "Dave Reid" here is telling false things in order to give his ideas about policies more value than the ideas of newbies.
2) Dave also say another false thing about my intention with a project I created today: how can state what I want to do with a project I just created and that never worked?

Please Dave, stop lying about facts. I don't pretend to be liked by you but simply stop this.

If you think that my behaviour require a ban then go ahead, but this would confirm that this community is not healthy in my view.

Then let's observe his behaviour and see where it leads, and take appropriate measures if he decides to completely wig out and create massive amounts of drama. Personally, I can fully understand why someone would honestly be confused why 960* is allowed and 0 is not. What's the hold-up in getting the guidelines published and linked from the top of the themes page and/or the create project page?

But IMO, again, this reaction is totally overblown. I can list 10 people off the top of my head who've collectively caused *months'* worth of pain and anguish for the webmasters team and are still allowed to be here because when they're not doing that they contribute something. When a new contributor inadvertently steps on a landmine in their first foray into the community, our priority should be to educate them, not to shoot them on sight.

bago: You would be wise to step back from this discussion, IMO. ;) Accusing people of lying never ends well. Let the webmasters team take care of this.

Let's calm down on this, and concentrate on drafting a clear policy about all this.

Agreed that calming down seems to be the best approach - a ban seems way out of proportion, and even long-term contributors disagree about what the policies actually are.

A few deep breaths, and a drink (for those who actually partake :) ) seem more in order.

A few deep breaths, and a drink (for those who actually partake :) ) seem more in order.

w00t! Nutritious V8 juice for everyone, on me! ;)

Thanks, Dave. Let us know if there's anything we can do to help get the policy set up somewhere where it's more visible and can help stop these kinds of issues in the future.

As one of the major participants in the thread(s) and issue(s), I just want to say that I don't think removing cvs access is the right answer either. Creating the project was definitely wrong and trolling (and purposefully so)-- but we always warn and watch bad behavior before removing/banning someone.

@webchick:
The hold up on the policy is basically feedback at this point. I drafted a book page at http://drupal.org/node/571754 (currently unpublished, but the text of it is crossposted to g.d.o for those that can't see unpublished nodes) based on discussions in various threads and the g.d.o page: http://groups.drupal.org/node/24465.

The basic idea is that themes hosted on drupal.org should 1) adhere to the GPL/GPL compatible license as outlined in http://drupal.org/licensing/faq and 2) be 'what you see is what you get' and 'what you get is what you see'.

We want to encourage themer contributions while at the same time protect the end user experience of those downloading themes from drupal.org which, unless they're downloading 'starter themes', tend to be less technical users. We don't want people downloading themes from d.o only to have an "oh, you wanted a steering wheel with that car?" tWTF type experience by downloading themes that are void of gpl style sheets, have screenshots that show another version of the theme available somewhere else (not what they actually downloaded), have grayed out theme settings ("step right up, you just have to buy x, y, & z to enable the theme settings you just downloaded from our handy dandy theme center"), etc.

However, rather than discussing and proposing concrete changes to the draft policy, the discussion has degenerated into creating dummy projects, trolling, arguing minutiae, etc.

imo if you have to argue whether or not a theme is complete, then it probably isn't.

@WorldFallz #13: why do you introduce more licensing policy issues here? I think we are already discussing this kind of improvements in the appropriate groups.

It is FALSE that I created the "zero" project as trolling. Please stop false statemens. IMHO "0" is a really cool name for a minimalistic theme and I plan to upload one as soon as I understand the policies (and if you won't be able to ban me before). What I wrote in that project is that I thought that "0" as "full name" and "zero" as "short name" was allowed by the policy (and in fact it is allowed as multiple webmasters confirmed) but given the chaos around policy I created it and then asked. I didn't ask before because I thought the name was really cool and I didn't want someone else to create that project reading my question, do you understand this? (the fact that "0" as fullname hit a bug is not my fault, and who fixed the bug confirmed this)

MY OPINION is that what you reported in this comment about "the basic idea" around "themes hosted on drupal.org" is something I read at least 100 times in the last 3 days. What I uploaded is compliant to #1 and I would just have to change the screenshot to be compliant with #2. BTW I think the issue here are not the 2 points you reported: anyone can agree they would be easy to fix and have keepitsimple published again. IMHO there is ONLY a policy issue, but something that is not written (neither in the handbook, or at least in what you copied to the group). I already commented all of this in the group and I don't understand why you raised this issue here.

The policy that would "prevent" keepitsimple to be fixed and published would be something along this line:
1) "themes in d.o. cannot link or reference external resources, even if they simply are DATA, like CSS, images, javascripts unless the resources are GPL" (note, GPL, not GPL-compatable, otherwise CC-BY data would be allowed)
2) "A special exception to the "external reference/download limitation" exists in order to allow 'bridging themes': we define 'bridging theme' a theme that enable generic themes or themes written for another platform to be used in drupal. In order to be allowed a bridging theme must support at least X free open source themes (maybe 6 is the best X. This is to exclude commercial bridges and to exclude single theme bridges like KeepItSimple).
3) I would also suggest improving the "screenshot" policy so that allow exception for "bridge themes" or "theme frameworks": there's no point in requiring them to show an unstyled/empty screenshot. It is much better to have a logo or a style-gallery example.

I still think that there are a lot of CC licensed styles out there (CSS+images) and allowing single bridge themes like keepitsimple (that I repeat do not violate any written GPL or CVS rule/policy) as long as they are written against Free Open Source styles (or maybe limit it to CC as this is the most common license out there) would be good for d.o. users as this would enable porting of a lot of beautiful *free* themes. BTW this is just my opinion and I'm happy to accept that the d.o. community prefer something different: but in this case please take in consideration the 3 changes above so that no one else will be fooled by the policy and waste time like I did. If you add that changes no one will be able to tell you that some webmaster apply personal judgement ignoring policies, don't you think?

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OT/humor: Isn't it funny that we had 100 messages in 24 hours discussing the publishing of a theme named "keep it simple" (http://drupal.org/node/416022)? I don't even want to imagine what could happen with a theme named "PITA" :-)