[Piers]

Is there really such a need for public conflict? I'm slightly ashamed.

You know being outside the team I would rather disagreement be public rather than hidden. Disaggreement, directness and debate are not a worry, nothing to be ashamed of there. The only rudeness was the locking of the PR without explanation (at the time). I hope that Martijn will be more circumspect before that doing that again.

I was not impressed by being told that I, and others, didn't know what we were talking about, but believe that the dialogue (if kept public) would show where the weaknesses lie. I have a better undertsanding of the team now, I hope they have a better understanding of me too.

There is a lot of discussion that's kept private, and for every obvious reasons. Debate is always healthy for a topic, but there needs to be a cut-off point in order for it to be productive. Going in circles, or deviating from the topic, is not productive.

[Paxxi]

As evidenced by my meagre post count I'm not much for forums or lengthy discussions, I tend to loose track after a while. Take this as my view of the recent events.

There's plenty of reasons why we try to keep the discussions on GitHub very narrowly focused, the below list is not exhaustive but only some examples.
1. Bike-shedding has been a major pain point where the discussion gets off topic and people loose track of what the PR is supposed to do. This usually ends with a closed PR or an abandoned PR where nobody dares take a decision to accept or reject it because nobody really knows what's the right choice.
2. Not everyone reacts to criticism the same, some like the big discussions, some might get upset by them and accidentally say something mean that they really did not intend. Some get stressed and can react in bad ways because they don't think through the answers before posting.
3. GitHub isn't really suited for large discussions and it can be hard to follow it when the comment count goes up.

Take this as you like, as said before we're all humans and we don't get paid for keeping up a professional appearance so bad things happen from time to time. Do we always handle it correctly? No. Do we listen to feedback? Yes. Do we listen to all feedback? I don't know, I don't.

It takes considerable effort from team members to review a PR, especially from non-team members. You want to rip it apart and nitpick so it ad hears to our coding guidelines without being mean and scaring away contributors. This is always a balancing act of what issues can we let slide to not be too hard and how can we formulate each and every thing we say so that the contributor is encouraged to fix the mistakes and keep contributing and not get turned off the whole thing.

We all have days where we fail at this for one reason or another and this can be seen in some PR's where someone says something and another team member tries to clarify or offer some encouragement to offset it.

In my opinion we currently strike an ok balance between encouraging contributions and keeping discussions on topic, not perfect mind you but ok. We are all grown ups and if we did offend someone let us know, maybe it was a mistake, maybe you did deserve it? Either way say something so we know what happened, don't just pout and run around telling people that we're the mean bully overlords from Satan's deepest darkest dungeons here to inflict pain and Kodi on everyone that stand in our way(though world domination is ofc an admirable goal).

Also keep in mind that there's language barriers, most team members don't speak English as their native tongue, what might be perfectly reasonable in their native language might come across as rude or just weird in English.

I think I lost track of what I was trying to say but this hopefully gives you an insight into the life of a team member.

Also, locking a forum thread for team members only may be heavy handed but it's the easiest way to stop people jumping into threads saying stuff like "have you tried poking your id3 tag with a carrot to make it scrape faster? lolololol" which usually isn't all that helpful unless poking stuff with carrots make you a happier person, in which case maybe this forum isn't the most suitable for you.

[DaveBlake]

Discussion of fixing the issues with Album Info raised on first page of this thread is now continuing here Music Album Info - Correctly Merging Gathered Data