Regardless of what is said out loud, I believe the author's intent was to annoy her tormentors into submission.

I do not think that writing IRC bots is wrong (though I would consider them irritating), I do not think quotes from famous women is necessarily wrong (though one could suppose a non-curated list could potentially go awry).

I don't have a problem with polite discourse, but I don't think that's what this was. I assume that she was polite when she brought it up before, when she was ignored. Had she stopped there, or gone to a superior, or an HR department, then I believe she would have been in the right.

Again, I'm not saying that what she did was offensive. Just that it wasn't the high road. It isn't the right thing to do.

She isn't Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the back of the bus, she's just trying to turn their own antics against them. As a prank, I'd applaud it. As a means of peacably resolving an uncomfortable situation, I consider it a failure, at best.

You've said at least a few times that you think the bot was designed to annoy, but I'm still curious as to what you think was or was intended to be annoying (let alone impolite) about it. Is there a way, in your eyes, that she could have been more polite without saying nothing at all?

Well, the intent to annoy is an impolite notion.

Aside from handling it with management instead of escalating the prank war, I don't see a lot of terribly polite ways above and beyond what she'd already done.

As for why I think it was intended to annoy, I suppose from my perspective at least, that's the obvious conclusion.

A bot annoyed her, so she wrote her own. From the text in the blog post, she seems to take pleasure in the annoyed reactions of her co-workers. That she got the annoyed reaction, and then sought to find a way to daemonize the script so that she could annoy them more thoroughly.

Those to me indicate a person who is being malicious, but is trying not to sound like they are.

Regardless, if there's anything I take umbrage with, it's that she thinks that this will help solve her issue, in any small way.

It's hard to look pragmatically at what might seem like justice, but looking for a similar analogy, if you've seen or read "The Help", the actions done to that poor pie were the result of a vengeful woman.

I'm not saying either woman didn't have cause to be upset, or angry, or that they might not have been driven to vengeful acts.

What I am saying though, is what I started off saying. Two rights don't make a wrong. I understand people sympathizing with her. She was done wrong. I get it. As a people though, we're supposed to be better than that.

Oh, wow. You are the false equivalency master.

The problem here is not that the bot is annoying, the problem is that the bot is sexist. Responding to sexist remarks with something that signifies that those remarks are sexist is not the same as making sexist remarks. Whether or not those two bots are annoying is a different issue that is now used as an excuse to rationalize hating on the second bot.

How can you be so blind to that? I’m sitting here in disbelief.

If I were the third, fourth, or fifth person, I wouldn't want my co-workers to feel like they were working in a place where they weren't welcome. Because it's by having great co-workers and a collegial environment that I expect to make my startup work.

Also, you're putting your thumb heavily on the scale here. Adding a bot that responds to "TWSS" jokes hardly makes an IRC channel "half as useful as it was".

You realize that this analogy misses the key point, which is sexism in the workplace, right? Her problem was not that there was a bot. Her problem was that there was a bot that made jokes she found sexist, and that her coworkers ignored her requests to take it down.

And my point is that the sexism in the workplace doesn't matter at all for what the analogy was saying. Ideally what would have happened is that they made the bot, then she asked for them to stop, and then they would have stopped. I mean, if someone emails the entire company an anti-semitic joke, that's bad. The response shouldn't be to send the entire company an email about the plight of the Jews in the holocaust. If a group of people are watching the sports illustrated swimsuit model thing in the break room, the appropriate response isn't to turn on a documentary of the women's civil rights movement up to the same volume in the same room to drown it out. My whole point is that while the original thing is wrong because it's offensive to people, the response is wrong too because it's childish.