[unanswered]

> Is there any good way to craft a message like this?

"We are resigning and our reasons have been shared privately with X group. <eom>"

But since the goal of the whole exercise is to generate publicity and drama, the above was an unacceptable approach and the approach actually taken was highly effective.

[kbenson]

I think that's an uncharitable interpretation. If your remit is to deal with issues like this, but you find the structure is broken enough that you can't do what you see as your job, what do you do?

Going public may be against the point of the group, but it might also be the only way seen to fix the problem and address the problems that prevent your group from doing its job.

So you're left with the unenviable option of explicitly doing what your team is not supposed to do in order to try to fix the team so it can function in the future. The responsible thing to do at that point would be to resign, so someone else can come in and gain the benefits you fought for, and your prior breaking of the rules does not taint the team.

I think that's the charitable view. I don't know if it's correct, but I do think it's worth considering.

[zozbot234]

They're committing to sharing these reasons with other Rust Team members, though. Just not the broader dev community.

[nrabulinski]

Then don’t make a whole big public announcement about it. As someone from the outside this just reads like a post specifically to generate drama and attention but not giving details as to direct it at anyone in particular.

[phoe-krk]

> Then don’t make a whole big public announcement about it.

I don't understand. How do you resign from a public project without resigning from that public project? If it is not about the resignation but about the message, do you think that a "we are resigning as a whole team that was made pbulic and we do not provide any public reason for that" would work any better?

[whatshisface]

They could have resigned without making a post about it. Is that a good idea? Maybe, it depends on the details we don't know.

[kbenson]

And what, leave the Rust community not knowing that there's no CoC team because they've all resigned over something, but the community wasn't informed?

It's not like there's some membership card with paid dues. Their responsibility was to anyone that viewed themselves as part of the Rust community, and consumes anything to do with that community (whether or not they put anything into it).

Not informing all the people of that community because it appeases random public commenters would be a far worse failure of their duties than letting the general public gossip.

[whatshisface]

>leave the Rust community not knowing that there's no CoC team

They did have the option of finding replacements before leaving.

[phoe-krk]

This isn't a post, it's a PR. If your names are listed in a public Git repository, then you need to have them removed if you resign. This means a PR and a review of that PR, which is exactly what happened here.

[pdpi]

Alternative: They step down without an announcement, get replaced, somebody pieces it together and posts it on HN or reddit or something, and now you have all the same drama from announcing it publicly, plus all the added drama from the "secret step down".

[baseballdork]

Not sure that I'd call a PR a "whole big public announcement". Sure, it wound up here, but I don't think you can blame that on the mod team.

[fragile_frogs]

They also posted the resignation on the Rust subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/qzme1z/moderation_tea...

[llogiq]

If matthieum hadn't done it, someone else would have (and has; some dupes have appeared and were subsequently removed).

[quacker]

There's a community of external contributors that deserve (or would appreciate) some notification about it though.

[unanswered]

So set `X = "other Rust team members"`. Everything else in the comment was just for drama.

[cormacrelf]

I don't think it was overly dramatic, but otherwise I agree with your point about pointing out another group with whom it has been shared, specifically a neutral party, if public muck-raking must be avoided at all costs. I made a similar point below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29308197