What if their comments are not "valid"? What if their agenda is stirring up shit, not the health of your project at all? To take an extreme but existing example (urbit), what if they want your project to die because they (think) they don't like you, a person working on the project?
A bad thing to do is to start thinking such things to begin with. Just because somebody expresses an idea that you personally disagree with it does not mean that they are "trolling", it does not mean that the idea is "invalid", it does not mean that they're trying to "stir up shit", and it does not mean that they're trying to "kill" an open source project.
Always respond to their concerns with professionalism, courtesy, and tact.
The absolute worst thing to do is to start censoring them. I've seen this happen with a number of GitHub projects in the past. People occasionally come along with ideas that some, or sometimes even just one, of the core contributors does not agree with. Even when the newcomers are participating in good faith, I've seen intolerant GitHub project leaders start deleting perfectly good comments, closing perfectly valid issues, rejecting perfectly good pull requests, deleting perfectly good wiki content, and otherwise engaging in behavior that is much more harmful than anything the newcomer could managed to have engaged in.
When I see that happening to new contributors, especially when it's a small project involved, then I know it's time to move on from that project, both as a user and contributor. I refuse to be associated with such nonsense.
Comments
What if their comments are not "valid"? What if their agenda is stirring up shit, not the health of your project at all? To take an extreme but existing example (urbit), what if they want your project to die because they (think) they don't like you, a person working on the project?
A bad thing to do is to start thinking such things to begin with. Just because somebody expresses an idea that you personally disagree with it does not mean that they are "trolling", it does not mean that the idea is "invalid", it does not mean that they're trying to "stir up shit", and it does not mean that they're trying to "kill" an open source project.
Always respond to their concerns with professionalism, courtesy, and tact.
The absolute worst thing to do is to start censoring them. I've seen this happen with a number of GitHub projects in the past. People occasionally come along with ideas that some, or sometimes even just one, of the core contributors does not agree with. Even when the newcomers are participating in good faith, I've seen intolerant GitHub project leaders start deleting perfectly good comments, closing perfectly valid issues, rejecting perfectly good pull requests, deleting perfectly good wiki content, and otherwise engaging in behavior that is much more harmful than anything the newcomer could managed to have engaged in.
When I see that happening to new contributors, especially when it's a small project involved, then I know it's time to move on from that project, both as a user and contributor. I refuse to be associated with such nonsense.