It was a great day. I finally, just before midnight, figured out how to get PPM to install Perl/Tk, and finally the old client application was running. I was praising ActiveState for having made this so easy. ActiveState is the answer, I was going to tell my client. When I got home, I installed Active Perl and all the other modules on my personal Mac, and showed the client application ran under a newer version of Mac OS X also. What had originally taken all day I was now able to do in 15 minutes. This was wonderful!
Next morning, I found an unpleasant email in my inbox from ActiveState:
Well, this thread was kind of old, perhaps 2008. But as I said, this was (or seemed to be) the most recent thread even mentioning Tk.
Maybe I erred in posting to such an old thread. But my idea is that likely simply using the word "partisan" or suggesting that the selection of packages for ppm might be biased in some way…that was just too much. "Flaming!" (Yes this is flaming, I admit in retrospect. But I think it is very very gentle, and was intended to be quickly retracted and replaced with praise if things went well.)
Perhaps, and possibly quite likely, it was entirely a mechanical thing, though nowhere do I see that "partisan" is a bannable word. Mentioning Perl/Tk at all ???
Anyway, I think the moderation, in simply dismissing my message and banning me forever without comment as if I had posted pornography--is cruel and stupid. It ruined my day, and will forever mean that I will not go out of my way to speak well of ActiveState, to praise them as I had been intending to do. I will generally speak no ill either, except where on my own website where I can vent and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as is required in any kind of accusation.
I now have, possibly long overdue, just gotten a similar feeling about Candians in general. Candians are not necessarily the nice people I mainly had in my imagination until today. Canadians are pursuing tar sands oil, and pressuring the U.S. Government to build a pipeline carrying oil solids dissolved in solvents through a pipeline across the USA, much to the further global disaster of global heating. Previously Canada successfully sued for billions in losses when California banned a gasoline additive made in Canada (because of it's effects, not because it was made in Canada). They have had a "conservative" government for some time, one very beholden to oil interests. Canada is a leading petro state.
ActiveState happens to be in British Columbia. Actually, British Columbia is banning a tar sands pipeline, interestingly enough, and kudos to them.
I think it's bad to treat anyone as ActiveState forum moderation treated me. It's bad all around. It does them no good, me no good. As far as explaining why, they are apparently legendary for not responding to questions, bug reports, whatever. No response whatever. Not even, "sorry, we don't answer questions unless you buy our support service." I suppose that's correct for the free products. Free means no support, no reply, nada. Some claim it works the same even if you have their paid service, but I suspect that some who claim that may not actually know.
They could at least tell me why I'm being banned. "Political discussions are not allowed." Well, that wasn't what I meant by partisan, but anyway. I suppose this is a pipe dream. Nobody tells you why. I suppose if you're fine if many people hate you, that's a perfectly acceptable strategy. Telling you why implicitly allows you to say something like "that isn't what I meant" and so forth. No reply means you have no recourse…and one might expect that is intended.
That said, ActiveState is providing a useful product to me, something that saved me a great deal of time, and I appreciate that. So perhaps I should be grateful, and never say an ill word.
No, I'll simply try to be honest as I can in telling the story, that is what this website is about, and not in a way to directly affect my clients work. I'll try not to let my ego get involved. If ActiveState has the active solution, I go with that, swallow my pride, I don't have much anyway. I can well imagine others might not be so sanguine, though, and that is one of many Critical points here.
I'll go to other forums when I need help. I won't say anything bad about ActiveState, unless in response to a question which permits no other honest answer, like "what is their free support like?"
Meanwhile, the problem I was having, so trivial, and suitable criticism for this column as well.
On all the Mac's I've used, the ppm uses a dark grey to indicate the selected button. That's confusing because grey also means not-selectable "greyed out". And further, in the leftmost button, the all important "View All Packages" button, the all critical box in the center is also grey. It looked to me for the first several hours that there was simply no way to select the "view all packages" button. The only thing not grey is a tiny arrow in the center which I overlooked. It seemed like for some reason I was being locked out. Perhaps you only got to select from the full list of packages if you got the full support. Especially on my work monitor, which has very unsaturated color. The only thing which suggests that the View All Packages button has been selected
I also frequently made the mistake of showing the column in reverse alphabetical order, which puts Tkx on top and Tk on the very bottom, after dozens if not hundreds of other Tk* modules.
Another confusing thing, the "Available" button looks like the button for finding out what modules are available for download, but it's actually the the button for those packages Available for Upgrade.
Next morning, I found an unpleasant email in my inbox from ActiveState:
I had posted two questions to the Forum the night before in my attempt to get Perl/Tk loaded into Active Perl. It turned out that my problem was quite simple, and I was meaning to post it to the forum the next day. But as it was happening, my best guess was that ActiveState did not allow the PPM to install Perl/Tk. The only Tk which seemed to be available was Tkx. That was little help to me in getting an old application using Perl/Tk--a very popular package--to work. So I posted the question like this, to a 3 message threat comparing Tke and Perl/Tk, which was the most recent thread I could find even mentioning Perl/Tk. I can't remember the original posting (and will correct the below if I can get at it somehow, but it was just letters I typed on a hypertext page and I don't think I have any copy--another thing worth complaining about as it happens so often that long messages typed into webpages get lost into the great bitbucket in the sky).
A Moderator has reviewed your recent submission to ActiveState Community Site.
The content was deemed inappropriate. The submission has been deleted from the pre-publication queue, and your account has been blocked from further posting.
The approach taken by Tke seems to be what Perl/Tk should have been from the beginning…just a thin layer on top of Tk. But Perl/Tk has been around a long time and is popular. [A previous poster said Tkx was more actively supported now.] Actually the latest version of Perl/Tk is from January 2015 and the latest Tkx is from 2010.
How can I get the ActiveState ppm to even install Perl/Tk? It only seems to allow me to install Tkx. Is this a partisan thing? I need Perl/Tk specifically to run an old client application.
Well, this thread was kind of old, perhaps 2008. But as I said, this was (or seemed to be) the most recent thread even mentioning Tk.
Maybe I erred in posting to such an old thread. But my idea is that likely simply using the word "partisan" or suggesting that the selection of packages for ppm might be biased in some way…that was just too much. "Flaming!" (Yes this is flaming, I admit in retrospect. But I think it is very very gentle, and was intended to be quickly retracted and replaced with praise if things went well.)
Perhaps, and possibly quite likely, it was entirely a mechanical thing, though nowhere do I see that "partisan" is a bannable word. Mentioning Perl/Tk at all ???
Anyway, I think the moderation, in simply dismissing my message and banning me forever without comment as if I had posted pornography--is cruel and stupid. It ruined my day, and will forever mean that I will not go out of my way to speak well of ActiveState, to praise them as I had been intending to do. I will generally speak no ill either, except where on my own website where I can vent and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as is required in any kind of accusation.
I now have, possibly long overdue, just gotten a similar feeling about Candians in general. Candians are not necessarily the nice people I mainly had in my imagination until today. Canadians are pursuing tar sands oil, and pressuring the U.S. Government to build a pipeline carrying oil solids dissolved in solvents through a pipeline across the USA, much to the further global disaster of global heating. Previously Canada successfully sued for billions in losses when California banned a gasoline additive made in Canada (because of it's effects, not because it was made in Canada). They have had a "conservative" government for some time, one very beholden to oil interests. Canada is a leading petro state.
ActiveState happens to be in British Columbia. Actually, British Columbia is banning a tar sands pipeline, interestingly enough, and kudos to them.
I think it's bad to treat anyone as ActiveState forum moderation treated me. It's bad all around. It does them no good, me no good. As far as explaining why, they are apparently legendary for not responding to questions, bug reports, whatever. No response whatever. Not even, "sorry, we don't answer questions unless you buy our support service." I suppose that's correct for the free products. Free means no support, no reply, nada. Some claim it works the same even if you have their paid service, but I suspect that some who claim that may not actually know.
They could at least tell me why I'm being banned. "Political discussions are not allowed." Well, that wasn't what I meant by partisan, but anyway. I suppose this is a pipe dream. Nobody tells you why. I suppose if you're fine if many people hate you, that's a perfectly acceptable strategy. Telling you why implicitly allows you to say something like "that isn't what I meant" and so forth. No reply means you have no recourse…and one might expect that is intended.
That said, ActiveState is providing a useful product to me, something that saved me a great deal of time, and I appreciate that. So perhaps I should be grateful, and never say an ill word.
No, I'll simply try to be honest as I can in telling the story, that is what this website is about, and not in a way to directly affect my clients work. I'll try not to let my ego get involved. If ActiveState has the active solution, I go with that, swallow my pride, I don't have much anyway. I can well imagine others might not be so sanguine, though, and that is one of many Critical points here.
I'll go to other forums when I need help. I won't say anything bad about ActiveState, unless in response to a question which permits no other honest answer, like "what is their free support like?"
Meanwhile, the problem I was having, so trivial, and suitable criticism for this column as well.
On all the Mac's I've used, the ppm uses a dark grey to indicate the selected button. That's confusing because grey also means not-selectable "greyed out". And further, in the leftmost button, the all important "View All Packages" button, the all critical box in the center is also grey. It looked to me for the first several hours that there was simply no way to select the "view all packages" button. The only thing not grey is a tiny arrow in the center which I overlooked. It seemed like for some reason I was being locked out. Perhaps you only got to select from the full list of packages if you got the full support. Especially on my work monitor, which has very unsaturated color. The only thing which suggests that the View All Packages button has been selected
I also frequently made the mistake of showing the column in reverse alphabetical order, which puts Tkx on top and Tk on the very bottom, after dozens if not hundreds of other Tk* modules.
Another confusing thing, the "Available" button looks like the button for finding out what modules are available for download, but it's actually the the button for those packages Available for Upgrade.
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