Hi All, Wow lots of a traffic, I'll not reply to all as I'll get over my 10 public posts of day sanity quote :-)
I will reply to Art though, as he's on the front line working to do the actual work to improve things and specific decisions need to be made. On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 6:58 PM, Art Tevs <arti_t...@yahoo.de> wrote: > What we need is a solution for that problem. I wouldn't like to cutoff forum, > and I think also no of the ~300 users of the forum would also like to make > so. Yes, signal to noise ratio on forums is more then on pure ML only. > However, as some of you has already stated out, this is more or less a social > problem then the engineering one. However, in order to make it better, we > require some strict rules/filters etc for a proper etiquette. I'm optimistic that the single to noise ratio can be improved, this is both in general content and the friendliness of the communication itself. The later is what I'm particular concerned about right now. Sure there are lots of newbies questions being asked by people who really should have done a bit more background reading, but that life we all come in difference shapes, sizes and preferences, as long as they are polite and patient it's actually kinda irresistible to help them out. The challenge is in having systems that coax people into communicating in friendly ways, and avoiding the pitfalls of mixed mediums. > So, what forum moderators could do is to > 1. filter out users, with non-appropriate real names - what do we meen by non > appropriate names? Is only a first name already appropriate? How about users > who would like to keep some kind of anonymization, by using only the first > name. Are names with two letters ok, as used by our asian friends, i.e. Li, > Xi, ... ? There was already a thread about that, but at the end there was no > real, concrete answer to this! There is a balance between individuals preference for short names and psuedo names and the ability of a mass model of communication, you simply can't have a community of several thousand and have people use just first names. Once you are in thread there is a reasonable chance that single names will be sufficient, but even then it's still quite common to see multiple Paul's to be writing in one thread. Having both a first name signature and the full name elsewhere displayed on the post is the best of both of worlds. On the email front right now the full name can typically be seen in From field, and with a well composed text the personal will manually sign there name with an appropriate salutation for the context. W.r.t what names are acceptable and what's not, this is a hard one. The bottom line is that it should possible to uniquely identify someone, there might not use there real name, but there have to identifiable as a particular person as it's a pretty fundamental part of human communication. Names also need to be readable and non offensive not some collection of letters or a silly phrase. One has to be mindful of language and cultural differences too, so hard and fast rules based on one cultures standards won't be viable. In the end one will have to have moderators that can make a good judgement call about how well suited a name is, and if it's not then have a standard mechanism and documentation on what names are appropriate so that those who get rejected will know that it's not person and that there is a simply remedy. > 2. Force to use some kind of template, when posting a reply or new topic. > This is already in use and is sometimes used by the users. Template is set as > default message, when posting something. So any user, who see this, should > understand what is this good for. I believe this is a good facility. Even if someone doesn't use the template there should at least get an idea of what basic structure is appropriate. Any ideal what percentage of forum users use this template? > 3. Should user's reply always include a quote of the previous message? I do > not really like such things, because they unnecessary pollute the threads. > Yeah, there is even a pollution from some of the email clients there, which > do quote the message in very strange manner. Which makes the reading very > hard. So this is not only a problem of forum users. Where you want to include the contents of the previous post in your reply depends upon how what you are trying to convey/answer. For instance with a bulleted post like this one I'm replying to it makes sense to use the original contents. As long as you can delete the reply contents easily I don't see a problem with it being there by default. I presume the forum will have both options anyway. > 4. Should users be forced to have a signature, which describes him/her > somehow or just have some appropriate name in the signature. What about users > which are using ML only and do not have signatures? Do we also exclude them > from the community? We should only exclude people who are abusive of the community/members of the community/the medium being used. Signatures are very useful though, I almost always sign my posts, I believe it's an important part of net etiquette, a little bit of oil in the cogs of an otherwise very try communication medium. > And please guys, do also think about that not only forum users are > responsible for bad etiquette in our community. What to do with such ML > users? I agree with and understand Robert, however, Robert, you should also > understand, that some of the things just cannot be solved in a programmer > way. There are people who just not able to follow very simple rules and we > shouldn't close our community also to them, I think ;) Agree here, bad etiquette happens from mailing list list subscribers and forum users alike. I do occasionally suffer bad etiquette when irritated, stressed or overworked. -- I believe settings good examples of communication is part of the solution. Pointing users to examples of what good communication and what a difference choosing names that others can relate to you by are all part of this mix. This is the human part to the solution to making the community to be a more rewarding to be part of. The system solutions are probably be down to refinement of signatures/templates. Perhaps being able to see what others will see of your posts would be useful as well. I haven't used the blog.openscenegraph.org to post anything yet, but I presume you get to review you post being it's submitted. Would it be helpful to provide what forum users will see of the post as well what text mailing lists users will see? On the system side as well one friction point that came up recently was the a smilely used in forum came through as a unintended sarcastic remark when it came through in email. See the text sent to the mailing list would help with this. Just nixing this smileys or sending a rich formatted email might be the solution for this type of mailing list/forum integration issue. Many thanks for you efforts of help improve things Art, Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list osg-users@lists.openscenegraph.org http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
