[OT?] news.gnome.org

[Thomas O'Dowd <tom nooper com>]

On 09 Apr 2001, Cody Russell wrote:
> I think news.gnome.org should remove the user comments feature entirely,
> and become strictly a news reporting site.  As far as I can tell, the
> comments feature is used almost exclusively by trolls.  Every time I
> look on this site, I am saddened and today I began reading some of the
> comments under the "Reef Project Announcement" headline and it just
> pissed me off.  We have comments like "i wish eazel would go away",
> "who's up for stopping the downward spiralling of the gnome project",
> "EAZEL is turning GNOME to a piece of shit".  Sure, there are also
> comments from reasonable people (mostly just trying to correct stupid
> things said by stupid people, most of whom won't listen to reason anyway
> I think) but you really have to dig into the comments before you find
> them.  I think the initial impression of the user comment system is,
> "These people are all idiots."

Cody,

As somebody just looking at Gnome.org and not taking part in any other
gnome activities up to yesterday, I'd like to add my 2 yen about the
news site.

Firstly, I find news.gnome.org really useful. Its really the only place
other than s/w updates where I can see that gnome is a living thing with
people involved and doing stuff. I don't think anyone disagrees with
this.

Next, your point about the comments on news articles is spot on in my
opinion. Namely, there is a lot of trolling going on. I am saddened by the
number of non-constructive critisisms that seem to pop up there. People
seem to be forgetting that this is a giant free s/w effort and if they 
don't like it, they can join in, help out and maybe even fix things. It
does harm the image that a potential user of Gnome has of the community
though.

Real question is who are the trolls and why are they venting their
frustrations with Gnome or its applications in gnotices? Who is the
comment section of gnotices for anyway? Is it for the Gnome community
or random troll? Just an idea, but would making posting account-based
not help? Do we want anonymous comments? A simple sign up might be 
email confirmation based like a mail-list. You login then and post your
comments, if you're obviously a troll then you get marked as such by
the community. I suppose that you've thought of all this or maybe 
not interested in the general idea but just something to throw out there.

Alot of people also seem to use gnotices comments to report bugs or make
feature requests where the topic is an application. Is this the right place
for that, probably not, but it does make for interesting conversations
sometimes. I personally like the comments section as it is an easy, informal
place to add and get feedback without the hassle of trying to signup to
the relevant mail-list or even knowing that the mail-lists exists.

Tom.
-- 
Thomas O'Dowd.          Nooping ->        http://nooper.com
tom nooper com          Testing ->        http://nooper.co.jp/labs