Edward O'Connor vs Xah Lee (2012)

By Xah Lee. Date: 2012-06-01. Last updated: 2021-06-05.

This page documents some conflicts between Edward O'Connor (aka hober) and Xah Lee (me), from my perspective.

Edward O'Connor is a Free Software Foundation fanatic, and quick to label people who disagree with him as “troll”.

We first met in Freenode's IRC #emacs channel in ~2006. At first he is friendly, but quickly considered me a “troll” due to my controversial opinions and unrelenting nature. Much more detail here: Freenode IRC Emacs Channel Ban on Xah Lee (2008).

Why would he consider me troll? Here's few of my essays, he probably consider them trolling. Judge yourself:

Edward runs a emacs blog aggregate site ~~http://planet.emacsen.org/~~. In ~2011-05-31, Alex Ott [http://alexott.net/ru/index.html] suggested that my emacs blog be added, but Edward turned the request down, saying that i'm a “consummate troll”. The request is at [2012-06-01 https://github.com/hober/planet.emacsen.org/pull/2 ]. Here's a screenshot:

Edward OConnor vs Xah Lee 2012-06-01 — Edward OConnor vs Xah Lee. (screenshot of [https://github.com/hober/planet.emacsen.org/pull/2] as of 2012-06-01.)

I have since learned, he also labeled several other programers troll. See: http://edward.oconnor.cx/experiments/trolls/

Here's a screenshot:

Edward OConnor troll list 2012-06-01 — Edward O'Connor's troll list. (Screenshot of [http://edward.oconnor.cx/experiments/trolls/] as of 2012-06-01)

here's text version:

Experiments with troll markup

See also the simple container of hCards on the block list brainstorming page of the microformats wiki, and my troll-filters project on github.
People I consider to be trolls Troll 	Email addresses
Rob Burns 	rob@robburns.com
John Foliot 	foliot@wats.ca, jfoliot@stanford.edu, foliot@stanford.edu
Xah Lee 	Xah@XahLee.org, xahlee@gmail.com
William Loughborough 	wloughborough@gmail.com
Andy Mabbett 	andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk
Shelley Powers 	shelley.just@gmail.com, shelleyp@burningbird.net
Leif Halvard Silli 	lhs@malform.no
Philip TAYLOR 	P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk
Some stats related to HTML 5
All of the above trolls have participated or are participating in the HTML 5 standardization effort except for Xah.

2021-06-05

I discovered, around 2019, that Edward O'Connor is now Theresa O'Connor.

2021-06-05 Seems, planet.emacsen.org is no more. Now the emacs blog aggregate is at https://planet.emacslife.com/ run by Sacha Chua.