Is your project prepared to deal with toxic behavior? What is your plan of action when members of your community are being harassed? Without a clear code-of-conduct and moderation guidelines you will likely spend more time discussing what to do than moderating. In the time that your projects leaders have spent coming to consensus, your community members are being attacked. While an individual leaving a project due to harassment is fairly hard to ignore, it is not as clear how many individuals decide not to get involved to avoid harassment and negative attention.
This talk will use case studies from the Node.js project to discuss the types of disruptive personalities that you can expect to run into online, and techniques for dealing with them. Working together we can make open source a safer place to collaborate.
In the time your team spends trying to get one toxic individual to behave appropriately, countless others will have unsubscribed from an issue they might have been able to help in.
People need to know that this type of trolling and harassment is happening.
The Node.js has people from a variety of backgrounds that are passionate about its direction and success, and not all of them see eye to eye politically. As such we have experience quite a variety of trolling and harassment, and have continued to improve our process for community moderation to keep up.
