The complaint about the delay in getting a blog syndicated was echoed by others: Arangel Angov took it up, writing: "And this is not the first time that someone complains about having this issue. How do we select the people that go out live on Planet GNOME? Is it only enough for the person to be a contributor (when i say contributor i mean every contributor) or only developers get added? Why is decision making and administration left to only one person?
"We should delegate this responsibility along with the appropriate access to more people and make a list of conditions that a person has to meet so he gets added cause it's clear that this is either too much work for one person or that person is not the right person for the job."
Another developer, Zeeshan Ali, referred to Waugh's delay in responding to email: "Jeff replied to him? 1 month is nothing, I had to wait for 1.5 years to get my blog syndicated to p.g.o and it's been months now that i have been asking him to put my picture there."
Waugh responded to Ali, writing: "I received a mail from you on 2006-05-09 which I replied to, but didn't hear back. I ended up adding you regardless during a post-travel sweep of Planet requests. I got the hackergotchi mail on 2007-04-30 and replied a week or so later with suggestions about it. I haven't received a new one, so you still don't have a hackergotchi on Planet GNOME. I'm sorry, but I can't go chasing after people for this stuff."
(A hackergotchi is a little picture which accompanies each blog post; it serves as "an avatar to identify the author of a given RSS feed in blog aggregators.")
But Ali wasn't finished, firing back: "You did reply to me? I NEVER EVER recieved (sic) any reply from you except for this one of course (meaning Waugh's reply which was quoted above)."
Another developer, Valek Filippov, suggested that email wasn't the right medium for dealing with such things. "I mailed him (Waugh) a lot with no answer, but to be honest I have no idea if he even read my mails and ignored them or my mails were spam-filtered for some reason or he'd answered but my spam-filter ate his replies. Bugzilla seems to be much better addressing such communication problems. Also it proves things. Nobody would be able to say 'Jeff didn't reply me for months' if we used bugzilla for p.g.o."
Waugh then chimed in, detailing why he had not dealt with the problem raised by Sandras. He did not respond to Ali again, but admitted that there were problems in the administration of Planet GNOME: "I know Planet GNOME maintenance has been patchy -- I've been thinking about ways to alleviate that while keeping strong editorship in place. The Board has prompted me about this too, so I have plenty of incentive to resolve it without any of the poop flinging we've seen in this thread."
