Why Phobos is cool

[Chris]

On Monday, 29 June 2020 at 23:35:13 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 6/29/2020 3:55 AM, Chris wrote:
>> and is taking offence at everything,
>
> That is a complete misunderstanding of what is going on here. 
> The targets of rude behavior are not the problem, it is the 
> rude behavior that's the problem.
>
> It's about professional demeanor.
>
> Unprofessional posts will be deleted.

Personally I think that the sentence was not really rude or 
insulting but maybe polemical, so within the range of a 
passionate and heated debate, I'd say, even in a professional 
environment.

IMO, it's neither fair nor good style to single out one sentence 
from a long post and dismiss the whole post because you consider 
the sentence to be rude or unprofessional. It may give people the 
impression that it's merely a strategy to avoid inconvenient 
questions / points. And since "professional demeanor" is a 
flexible term one can always change the criteria as one sees fit 
(another one is "unspecific" which has become a rather unspecific 
term too :).

In this case, you could have just said something like "That's not 
a nice way to put it, but I get your point [answer] ...May I ask 
you to be a bit more careful in your choice of words the next 
time. We're trying to keep things strictly professional here."

As for the point the poster made, there is no answer I guess, 
because relying on volunteers is a big gamble and only because 
people have stepped up in the past doesn't mean it's gonna be 
like that forever. Again, for the third time, you haven't 
addressed this point but instead talked about "professional 
demeanor".