Poisonous users, a live example

It's ironic that a couple of weeks after this silly display of zealotry, this interesting video on how to deal with poisonous users would be highlighted on slashdot. We're quite fortunate with Rosegarden that we almost never had to deal with this problem. I can only think on one occurrence, but the guy actually turned into a valuable contributor once we explained the problem to him.

The thread linked above on the merits of KDE's new file manager, Dolphin has pretty much all of the standard features of the clueless user who can't tolerate having to change his ways. His point is that his current way of working is the best one and must not be altered, more specifically must not be simplified or "dumbed down". I'm pretty sure there's a strong correlation between how much a user wants his environment to be configurable, and how not unproductive he actually is. I.e., the more you care about fine-tuning your tools, the less you actually use them. The extreme being, you guessed it, PC tuners :-). View it as a form of procrastination if you will, I've yet to see someone who's adamant about "having choice" (which really means wanting to use his pet apps and considering that anything else is crap) also producing anything useful.

That won't prevent him from demanding to see the data from usability tests, only if those contradict his own usage patterns of course (which are completely geekish but he can't realise that).

On a side note, you have to be impressed by Aaron's tactful and patient behavior all throughout the thread.