UPDATE: Loren has responded with his side of the story in the comments section below. Worth checking out for a bit more perspective.

Want the RubyGems maintainers to take you seriously? It's not as hard as you might think. In fact, I can give you three counterexamples illustrating what not to do, and pretty much tell the whole story.

1) Don't name a bug report "Scary warnings are scaring helpless developers who can't do a thing about it". While quite descriptive, a better title might be something like the following: Suggestions for improving deprecation warnings and reducing their impact on end users. I can't help but think that a patch with this title, followed by a description with a similar tone would at the very least be rejected more gracefully by the maintainers.

2) Don't create your own fork of the world's most used Ruby project without at least submitting a patch or two first. We now have SlimGems, but according to Ryan Davis at least, Loren has never even attempted to submit patches to RubyGems. I won't deny that there are obviously underlying personal conflicts at work here, but there are classier ways to solve this problem. The right to fork is sort of like a nuclear bomb, it could be used as a deterrent, but once you actually use it, it's pretty much leads to widespread destruction with little benefit.

3) Don't write flamebait patches. Giles Bowkett wrote a one character typo fix but decided to name his commit message: "ENGLISH MOTHERFUCKER, DO YOU SPEAK IT?". This pull request was promptly closed and ignored, and rightfully so. While you can swear all you want in your own projects, on stage, or wherever else you want, if you are making a commit to a project that ultimately gets merged upstream into mainline Ruby, just resist the urge to quote sam jackson, and your patch will be merged. I re-submitted the same patch with a sane message and it was merged very shortly after I sent a pull request.

I'll also throw my own personal opinion into the mix, just for good measure. Right now, the person we have as the front man for RubyGems is Ryan Davis. I've been in the Ruby community long enough to know that Ryan can be outright rude to people sometimes. But in my experience, if you act civilly towards him, you'll at a minimum be treated civilly in response. The examples above are not ones of civility but instead the sort of passive-aggressiveness that surrounds what should be a totally uncontroversial project.

The RubyGems project is one that is infamously known for burning people out and making them head for the hills. Working on that project is thankless work, and while I don't want to hold up Ryan (or Eric, or anyone else who's worked on the project) as a poster boy for how communities ought to be run, I have respect for the difficult position they are in. It's easier for you to be civil to them in your interactions then it is for them to come out from under the culture of negativity that permeates through this project.

Remember that old saying "Matz is nice and so we are nice"? Last I heard, it hasn't yet been amended to "Matz is nice and so we are nice, unless zenspider acts like a dick to us". So please, check your nerd rage at the door, submit real patches and bug reports to RubyGems without throwing gas on the fire, and you may be pleasantly surprised at what you find.