Re: news.gnome.org again

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2001 at 12:43:14PM -0400 or thereabouts, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 
> > It doesnt work at all for slashdot. Sane messages not expressing the approved
> > site viewpoint are moderated to oblivion. 
> 
> Well, at least to me, I get to enjoy a lot the posts that are bumped
> up to +5.  

But (a) the shit at -1 is still there, and (b) they're bumped to 
five by people who don't know what they're doing.

There was an occasion where an Ask Slashdot question was about the
feasibility of "us all getting together to write a program that could
understand .doc files". Up at five were tons of posts explaining why
it couldn't be down. Down at one was the author of wv pointing out that
that program already existed, what it did, what other similar programs
did, and so on. 

Lots of moderators does not seem to improve your chances of them all
knowing anything about the subject.

And moderation relies on people doing it. The night W Richard Stevens'
(I think) obituary was posted there, I had moderator points, and I was 
in tears (no joke) desperately trying to moderate down the trolls and 
absolutely foul stuff that was being posted by people I have trouble 
accepting as part of the human race. People were posting begging them 
to stop as Stevens' family read the site. They didn't stop. It's a 
game to them: one for which they have unlimited time and energy. "Oh
look, I got something obscene about someone who just died visible for
at least half an hour. Time to write another now that's been caught."
This is not a game I want to play. 

Why should someone have to go and clean up a site and moderate things 
up and down just so that people with preferences set to high can avoid 
comments which should never have been posted in the first place? It seems 
backwards to me.

I'd prefer to see some accountability introduced than to assume we
can find lots of patient volunteers to weed out the rubbish who will
spot something nasty within five minutes of its posting and do something
about it. 

I realise this goes straight back to several discussions which are
off-topic for this list, but to get back on-topic, I really don't 
think Slashdot-style moderation is the way to go for Gnotices. 

Unfortunately the only two ways I can think of to attain some kind
of decency on a site are either to have a really nasty user interface
which puts off almost everyone from posting or to have some kind of
control over who posts in the first place. I've seen both done elsewhere.
But I'm not sure either of those routes are too in line with the
ideals of a project that's for everyone and tries to make things
easy :) 

Telsa

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