Re: [OT?] news.gnome.org

["Steve Hall (digitect)" <digitect mindspring com>]

From: "Thomas O'Dowd" <tom nooper com>
> 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.

There was a brief discussion about this in the thread "My first stab at
the site" started by Steve Fox on 3/12/01. I think we pretty much agreed
that some moderation might be a good thing, but overkill just creates
huge maintenance headaches.

You're always going to have abuse in an open system. What's to stop
someone from creating half a dozen new alias logins just to flame the
community? (I'm certain there are still plenty of yahoo email addresses
available even if we force email address confirmation.) As I said in the
earlier thread, a two or three level permission status does at least
make abusers go through a modicum of work. But we all still have to take
the responsibility of calmly reply to obvious hot-headedness or abuse on
occasion.


Steve Hall  [ digitect mindspring com ]