Linux filesystem defragmentation flame war

Earlier this week I’ve read this article: “Defragmentation of Linux Filesystems”. The title and the headline made me interested enough, to go ahead and read it and see if there was something there to show me that linux filesystems do need defragmentation. The result was that I was not convinced at all, and on a quick check on some of my most used systems I could not see any defragmentation issues.

Still the reason for this post is not a technical one, but a human one. Let’s see what was my reaction to this particular article:

• I noticed it somehow, doesn’t matter how, and decided to read it
• I didn’t agree with the author and what have I done? well since I am extremely busy I have obviously moved quickly away to something else, without even looking back…
• But what if I did had some time to kill? What could I do? Well if I had a useful addition to the post I could have added my opinion. But what if I didn’t had anything useful to add? and nothing to do… Should I start an injury comment and crush the author? Who would benefit from this? This is what I am trying to respond in this post… just check out the comments and you will see what i mean.

This happened to me also, and some of my articles (mostly the ones that were featured on digg) where I have seen a lot of injuries and flame created by some peoples. This really hurts the person writing something and trying to do something useful and publishes an original article.

Reading a comment like this: “We’re very thankful for that and we don’t really need your crappy tools and your BS FUD articles. Seriously. WTF are you thinking??? Any newbie on UbuntuForums could have done a better job at researching the facts before posting this pile of nonsense that you dare to call “article”….” made me think… what kind of a person would post such a comment? And even more, why? The first question, is best answered by the commenter himself: “YES, I AM AN A$$HOLE. I am not even trying to hide it.”

But what kind of value would bring such a comment to an article? Probably the poster feels good that he said something ‘great’, but what about the users reading the site? Does this show them the ‘right’ way to do it? Does it bring any arguments against the author’s conclusion? If this would have been from a well known authority then I could have said that we can’t understand geniuses, and they can be strange sometimes. But do you think these guys are kernel guru’s patching the ext3 code regularly? I thought so… They don’t even include a website address for us to see their great achievements and works done during their ‘careers’. It is very easy to be anonymous and insult anyone, right?

Well, in such cases, personally I would delete those comments. Period. Without any concern… If this is a user that has posted at least his name, and/or site, I would leave it on, for peoples to see who he is and what authority he has talking like that, but if he calls himself, xhatever123 I would hit delete without any concern. It you don’t want to read my articles and don’t have anything useful to add, I would not even want you on my site at all. Really, it is not worth it…

The author of the article has already found out that when you post something on the web, you need to be prepared for such reactions. There are strange peoples out there, that even if they don’t have anything useful to say, they will start insulting you, for their own pleasure. We all know that comments add value to blogs, but I don’t think such comments add anything valuable to anyone. And keep in mind that it is always much easier to just destroy something than to help build something useful. optimizationkit don’t let this take you down! This happened already to many bloggers.