thanks. think you meant "when an angel investor with a big mouth and no taste like 500 Startups puts money into..."

regardless, we don't shy away from helping our founders, even should they go astray. not proud right now, but we hope to be helpful where possible.

live & learn.

Dave, I wanted to tell you that I think the way you were handling the situation with DHH on Twitter was great! I saw a video on YouTube titled "the last lecture" a while back, and the biggest takeaway for me was how the guy defined an apology:

Proper apologies have three parts: 1) What I did was wrong. 2) I’m sorry that I hurt you. 3) How do I make it better? It’s the third part that people tend to forget…. Apologize when you screw up and focus on other people, not on yourself.

This has stuck with me and I noticed you were following on it very well, patiently and with humbleness.

The most import part of that apology formula is missing, actually meaning it. Also if the answer to #3 is obvious (ie stop doing what your apologizing for) then one shouldn't have to ask.

Exactly. When I'm hurt by, and/or furious at someone, the last thing I want to do is spend cycles coming up with how they can make it better. Someone did me wrong and now they want me to figure out how to fix it? Hearing someone ask me that would make me even more mad and hurt.

I always thought the best approach is to ask; not in a stupid way, but in a well-meaning way. As an example say I rear end your car during the morning traffic hour. I ought to get out of my car and say i) I should have been driving more carefully, clearly I have ruined your day, ii) You seem to be dressed for work so now you're going to be late because of me, probably going to be distracted the rest of the day, and will be hassled with car repairs and insurance claims - I am very sorry about that iii) Let me at least pay for your damages (insurance deductible), give you a ride to work (or pay for a cab), and please let me know if there is anything else I can do to help you with any inconveniences caused by this incident.

dave, what do you think should be allan's response here.. because this is stupid enough to actually be true and an honest mistake. But this is something thats going to stick around especially with dhh making so much noise, which he have every right to. I mean a startup might dig themselves into a hole like this sometimes.. so is "fix it, apologize and move on" a solution or as it seems to be the case here , allan has apologized thrice ...

Dave, your founder has a pattern of stealing not just from 37signals..

Guess what? The issue will not die this weekend..

What is your plan B?

I don't envy you right now. It must be akin to apologizing to your neighbor while your pet donkey is run amok in their flower bed.

None of that post makes any grammatical sense.

This is beyond the pale and it is not a case of 'live and learn'. Every single one of us as developers have taken the page layouts of others, even looked at their code and then coded something ourselves based around it. What you don't do is list layout code straight and insert your own images and URLs. I take it you're investing enough to employ people with HTML, CSS and front-end skills?

Will you throw some funding at me please?

Does creating all these throw away accounts impact the system much? You know you're gonna say something offensive to someone so you create a burn account.

PG would obviously need to clarify; but I assume he clears out the accounts with just a few comments that have almost never been logged-in to.

The only way to try and stop it is to prevent people being able to create a new a/c from an ip address they were using to login with on their proper account. (and maybe penalize them for trying).

That's probably a fruitless effort though with proxies et al.

One solution that is employed by some sites (SBNation, for instance) is to have a period of time (a day or a few days) after signing up before a person is able to comment. That way genuine new users are forced to lurk a bit and learn the ways of the community and it could also prevent things like the people creating burners just to come say stuff they aren't willing to associate with their real name. You'd also largely prevent stuff like the Reddit invasion on SOPA day, etc.