@davidgerard First, what "mask" do you think has come off?
Second: if you look hard, you still will not find either of us "defending her honor". Please do not put words in our mouths.
We did do our best to close down the conversation; what good comes from hundreds of posts of people throwing names at each other? There are enough posts criticizing the person involved for anybody to get the point; there are almost none in the other direction. Trust me that this would not have been the case had we let the conversation run. *That*, perhaps, indicates an editorial bias, but it is not the one you are accusing us of.
Look, as I posted in the thread, had we known the backstory of the person involved, there is a good chance we would not have run that article. We are a small operation, we lack a biographical research unit, we will not have a background file on any of the hundreds of developers we write about over the course of a year.