Re: National Website in Japan (pressing for an action)

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

On 26 May 2001, Owen Taylor wrote:

>
> Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu> writes:
>
> > > That isnt the problem. In fact if gnotices fell down irrepairably it would be
> > > a major plus point for the gnome project. Gnotices consists of nothing but
> > > libel, defamation and actionable hate speech.
>
> One area where we can be glad that gnome.org is hosted in the US.
>
> > I'm inclined to agree. Theoretically I like the idea of having a place
> > where people can discuss articles etc, but Gnotices is not that place.
> > Pragmatically speaking it has turned into a place to troll, flame
> > application developers, and drag people through the mud. We should
> > evaluate gnotices based not on what it should be but on what it is. In
> > that sense I would be very much in favour of shutting gnotices down, at
> > least for a few months to see if we can bring it back "better".
>
> What makes you think there is any chance it would come back better?
>
> If we want to eliminate trolling, well, there is a very easy solution
> - turn on moderation of comments. If people would like this, then they
> could help it happen by volunteering to assist with moderation.
>
> More intricate solutions are possible. I suggested several weeks ago
> that we probably should require an account with an emailed password
> for posting, though that would require implementation. (Various
> people followed up to object to the idea.)
>
> In any case, I think having a news site, whether there are comments or
> not on it, is a good thing, and turning it off would look bad
> for GNOME.

The other option would be to use some of Zope's access controls.  If you
remove the "can post replies" permission (or whatever it is called) from
the anonymous user, only people with accounts that have that permission
could post.

The Zope Portal Toolkit has some authentication methods other than the
default one that comes with Zope that are more appropriate to web site
(eg. simple creation of accounts, cookie based auth).  With a bit of Zope
programming, it should be possible to add a bit of accountability to
gnotices postings.  I am not sure how difficult this would be in practice
though.

James.

-- 
Email: james daa com au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/