OK, so I read this bug report. I think it says a lot that the focus from you (and, it looks like, the representative rest of Mozilla) is on the perceived "bullying" (it's not bullying) and the "incivility" (give me a break), and not on the actual problem being reported by the user.
You want us to consider context when talking about his most recent bug report being banned? OK, then we should also consider context when reading the "...every time I see a comment from [a specific Thunderbird developer]..." bug report too, because it's clear that this guy has had his objections and bug reports ignored a couple too many times.
Changing Command-F is broken ui. Period. You just don't do that. To an experienced, battle-weary developer, it's one of those blatantly obvious things that makes them want to scream at the sky.
Me? I would have just cussed at the software -- like I do every day at Firefox -- and then thrown my hands up, decided there wasn't much I could do because there isn't yet another option available, and gone on with my day. This guy is speaking for a ton of users who, like me, gave up the battle of communicating this kind of stuff over and over again.
I'm not writing this for you, though, because that would be a waste of my time. I'm writing it more as a caution to any other businesses that haven't yet fallen victim to this trap: listen to your customers, even when they're pissed off.
Most other people here are discussing the degree to which he was/was not a bully. You've actually hit the nail on the head: this bug submitter is _absolutely right_ (old bug and new bug). Why not also remap ctrl-c to paste and ctrl-v to delete line?
I'm not sure if it is a sense of humor thing, but I don't get anger from his bugs at all. A bit of frustration, and colorful language. But that's not rage.
He's profoundly wasting his time by bothering to talk to Mozilla developers. I learned long ago that they are extremely cliquish, and don't care what you think. They will do whatever they feel like doing, whether or not it makes sense. Personally I quit using thunderbird when they pushed an updated, it broke the client, and their reply on the forum was more or less "too bad, sucker".
No one deleted his bug reports. This isn't about whether or not Thunderbird has bugs. The Thunderbird developers are not ignoring the substance of his reports (mostly duplicates which have already been reported by people spewing far less venom.)
This is about this particular individual and whether he was adding more value than he was taking from the project. The decision was made that he was hurting more than helping and so he was kicked out.
You want us to consider context when talking about his most recent bug report being banned? OK, then we should also consider context when reading the "...every time I see a comment from [a specific Thunderbird developer]..." bug report too, because it's clear that this guy has had his objections and bug reports ignored a couple too many times.
Changing Command-F is broken ui. Period. You just don't do that. To an experienced, battle-weary developer, it's one of those blatantly obvious things that makes them want to scream at the sky.
Me? I would have just cussed at the software -- like I do every day at Firefox -- and then thrown my hands up, decided there wasn't much I could do because there isn't yet another option available, and gone on with my day. This guy is speaking for a ton of users who, like me, gave up the battle of communicating this kind of stuff over and over again.
I'm not writing this for you, though, because that would be a waste of my time. I'm writing it more as a caution to any other businesses that haven't yet fallen victim to this trap: listen to your customers, even when they're pissed off.
I wrote it here, too: http://robsheldon.com/ivorytower