Re: Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Filipus Klutiero]

So this means ignoring any concerns and pressing on regardless?

Which concerns would have been ignored?

[...]

Regards,
--
MJR/slef
  



--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Russ Allbery]

MJ Ray  writes:
> Russ Allbery  wrote:
>> MJ Ray  writes:

>>> So this means ignoring any concerns and pressing on regardless?

>> Disagreeing with you is not the same thing as ignoring concerns.
>> Making that accusation is a cheap debate tactic.  Without mind-reading,
>> you have no idea whether someone is ignoring your concerns or just
>> continuing to disagree with them and not interested in discussing them
>> with you more than they already have.

> That curly thing on the end of the quoted line is a question mark.
> I know I have no idea whether they're ignoring any concerns or just
> continuing to disagree with them, so I asked.  OK?

> Misinterpreting a question as an "accusation" is even cheaper.

Hm.  Okay.  I apologize for misinterpretating your intention.  It struck
me as a rhetorical question intended to make an accusation, but that's
probably not a conclusion that I should jump to based on e-mail
discussions.

For whatever it's worth (and this is provided just for information, not
because I expect you to change your communication style to fit me or
anything like that), I would have understood your intention if the
question had been phrased as "Do you intend to press on despite the
concerns expressed here earlier?"  (Which based on the above is I think
equivalent to what you meant.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Jurij Smakov]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 12:40:24PM +, MJ Ray wrote:
> Jurij Smakov  wrote:
> > The 'mailvoting' alioth project [0] has been created. There are also 
> > two mailing lists, 'mailvoting-discuss' and 'mailvoting-devel', for 
> > general discussion and implementation discussion, respectively. Please 
> > subscribe [1] to them, if you are interested in contributing.
> >
> > [0] http://mailvoting.alioth.debian.org/
> > [1] http://alioth.debian.org/mail/?group_id=100282
> 
> So this means ignoring any concerns and pressing on regardless?

This is something which I'm undertaking of my own accord, out of 
curiosity and belief that it can make a difference. This effort is not 
officially endorsed by the project in any way, there is no intention 
to push for such an endorsement in the nearest future either. As for 
the concerns, I've seen approximately 5:1 ratio of 
positive-to-negative feedback on the idea, so yes, I don't have a 
problem ignoring these concerns.

> What's a rant about zionism got to do with this?  Is it spam?
> If so, why didn't the list admin block it?

This was spam, which got through, because the lists are created with 
configuration which allows everyone to post to the lists. After I saw 
it, I've changed the configuration to limit posting to subscribers 
only (I know it's controversial, but I guess that's a lesser evil then 
getting them flooded with spam).

Best regards,
-- 
Jurij Smakov   ju...@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/  KeyID: C99E03CC


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[MJ Ray]

Russ Allbery  wrote:
> MJ Ray  writes:
> > So this means ignoring any concerns and pressing on regardless?
>
> Disagreeing with you is not the same thing as ignoring concerns.  Making
> that accusation is a cheap debate tactic.  Without mind-reading, you have
> no idea whether someone is ignoring your concerns or just continuing to
> disagree with them and not interested in discussing them with you more
> than they already have.

That curly thing on the end of the quoted line is a question mark.
I know I have no idea whether they're ignoring any concerns or just
continuing to disagree with them, so I asked.  OK?

Misinterpreting a question as an "accusation" is even cheaper.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Russ Allbery]

MJ Ray  writes:

> So this means ignoring any concerns and pressing on regardless?

Disagreeing with you is not the same thing as ignoring concerns.  Making
that accusation is a cheap debate tactic.  Without mind-reading, you have
no idea whether someone is ignoring your concerns or just continuing to
disagree with them and not interested in discussing them with you more
than they already have.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Adeodato Simó]

* MJ Ray [Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:40:24 +]:

> What's a rant about zionism got to do with this?  Is it spam?
> If so, why didn't the list admin block it?

It took me a bit to figure out that you meant [1].

  [1]: 
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/mailvoting-devel/2009-January/00.html

-- 
Adeodato Simó dato at net.com.org.es
Debian Developer  adeodato at debian.org
 
«Ara que ets la meva dona, te la fotré fins a la melsa, bacona!»
-- Terenci Moix, “Chulas y famosas”


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[MJ Ray]

Jurij Smakov  wrote:
> The 'mailvoting' alioth project [0] has been created. There are also 
> two mailing lists, 'mailvoting-discuss' and 'mailvoting-devel', for 
> general discussion and implementation discussion, respectively. Please 
> subscribe [1] to them, if you are interested in contributing.
>
> [0] http://mailvoting.alioth.debian.org/
> [1] http://alioth.debian.org/mail/?group_id=100282

So this means ignoring any concerns and pressing on regardless?

What's a rant about zionism got to do with this?  Is it spam?
If so, why didn't the list admin block it?

Regards,
-- 
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Jurij Smakov]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 06:05:09PM +, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> 
> Another point is that most people are probably going to be pretty busy 
> with holiday stuff over the last couple of weeks (I'm leaving for a 
> two-week vacation myself tomorrow), so we'll have to get back to 
> implementation details in the New Year. I was thinking about creating 
> an Alioth project for it, but I'm open to other ideas.

The 'mailvoting' alioth project [0] has been created. There are also 
two mailing lists, 'mailvoting-discuss' and 'mailvoting-devel', for 
general discussion and implementation discussion, respectively. Please 
subscribe [1] to them, if you are interested in contributing.

[0] http://mailvoting.alioth.debian.org/
[1] http://alioth.debian.org/mail/?group_id=100282

Best regards,
-- 
Jurij Smakov   ju...@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/  KeyID: C99E03CC


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[George Danchev]

On Monday 05 January 2009 12:17:42 MJ Ray wrote:
--cut--
> There are already crude mechanisms (reply privately, reply publicly,
> report abuse and so on) but they are social more than technical.

Agruably, these mechanisms don't reveal the big picture to the society (i.e. 
what people think about someone's *public* message), thus they would hardly 
be classified as pretty much social.

> While a more technical tool may help, a near-totally technical one
> probably can't fix social problems.

I don't see how you can consider gathering message voting data and exposing 
the results to the society as not being social, but near-totally technical 
one. That just helps sorting out and revealing society own's data and overall 
position.

-- 
pub 4096R/0E4BD0AB 2003-03-18 


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[MJ Ray]

Nick Phillips  wrote:
> On 22/12/2008, at 9:42 PM, MJ Ray wrote:
> > Show me the numbers.  I believe that the current "silent majority" is
> > by definition silent and most of it will continue to be silent,
> > watching lists just in case something useful appears and refusing to
> > participate in improving the lists, as they have so far.  Meanwhile,
> > the vocal minorities will continue to be vocal and so more
> > enthusiastic (ab?)users of any Whuffie system which is implemented.
>
> Refusing to participate in improving the lists? Those of us who try to  
> remain
> silent until we have something useful or important to say *are*  
> improving the lists.

Indeed, but those who post when they have something useful or
important to say aren't part of the "silent majority" (or the "vocal
minority" either), so I wasn't suggesting they are refusing to
participate.  I think that emphasising such posters would be a good
part of any solution - and it's missing from the current proposal,
as far as I've seen so far.  I mean, it could happen with that system,
by chance, but there seems no reason that it would.  In fact, the
tendency of active list followers to divide quickly makes me think
it's extrememly improbable.

> Some mechanism to indicate to posters that their posting was not  
> appreciated would be
> useful and appreciated, so I'm sitting here watching those with more  
> time to spend on
> it come up with ideas to improve them further.

There are already crude mechanisms (reply privately, reply publicly,
report abuse and so on) but they are social more than technical.
While a more technical tool may help, a near-totally technical one
probably can't fix social problems.

Hope that helps,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Nick Phillips]

On 22/12/2008, at 9:42 PM, MJ Ray wrote:


George Danchev  wrote:

On Saturday 20 December 2008 21:33:27 MJ Ray wrote:

So, people who remain on the debian mailing lists have a poor
understanding of what should appear a good mailing list,


What makes you think that "vocal minority" is larger than "silent  
majority" in
debian mailing lists?  If the "silent majority" has decent means to  
evaluate

the traffic of the mailing list (i.e. by means of voting messages for
example) then I believe it will do it happily, or at least chances  
to do so

increase dramatically.


Show me the numbers.  I believe that the current "silent majority" is
by definition silent and most of it will continue to be silent,
watching lists just in case something useful appears and refusing to
participate in improving the lists, as they have so far.  Meanwhile,
the vocal minorities will continue to be vocal and so more
enthusiastic (ab?)users of any Whuffie system which is implemented.


Refusing to participate in improving the lists? Those of us who try to  
remain
silent until we have something useful or important to say *are*  
improving the lists.


Some mechanism to indicate to posters that their posting was not  
appreciated would be
useful and appreciated, so I'm sitting here watching those with more  
time to spend on

it come up with ideas to improve them further.


Cheers,


Nick


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Recommender systems (Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems)

[Filipus Klutiero]

Thanks for writing to my email address; I'm not subscribed to the list as you 
may have realized.

Le December 29, 2008 06:59:30 am MJ Ray, vous avez écrit :
> Filipus Klutiero  wrote:
> > MJ Ray wrote:
> > > I consider filtered indices, auto-responses, shadow lists of only
> > > "good" messages, highlighting, integration with db.debian.org and some
> > > of the other uses for this data to be recommendation systems.
> >
> > A filtered thread index as proposed is not a recommendation list.
>
> A filtered thread index as proposed could be a recommendation system
> according to both descriptions posted, although it depends how one
> interprets "suggest", "support" and so on, and how much
> personalisation one believes is needed to be a recommendation system.
I don't remember anything in this thread suggesting any level of 
personalisation, so I don't understand why you question the efficiency of 
message-voting due to concerns with recommender systems.

Even if you considered a filtered thread index as a recommendation list, your 
quote does not mean that recommender systems perform badly, it just means 
that some of the current systems have suboptimal aspects and proposes 
solutions. Furthermore, these aspects do not apply in the case of filtered 
thread indices.
>
> One can just as well see many drawbacks by looking at more general
> "collaborative filtering" research - or even out into more general
> population clustering work to see the reasons for the drawbacks - but
> it's a bit older, so less of it is online, so I didn't refer to it.

> I'm pretty sure that someone would react to the obvious problems in
> using an unpersonalised filtered thread index (which is a
> collaborative filter, isn't it?) by personalising it to make some sort
> of simple recommendation system, wouldn't they?
An unpersonalised filtered thread index wouldn't be an application of 
collaborative filtering.
According to Wikipedia:
> Collaborative filtering systems usually take two steps:
>
>1. Look for users who share the same rating patterns with the active
> user (the user whom the prediction is for). 
> 2. Use the ratings from those 
> like-minded users found in step 1 to calculate a prediction for the active
> user

It is possible that readers using an unpersonalised filtered thread index 
would want something personalized. I don't know, that's why I think data on 
the efficiency of CF in discussion systems would be interesting.

Since you seem to have misunderstood the meaning of CF, I assume the previous 
paragraph may be confused, but if you think it stands, please specify your 
concerns.


--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Re: Recommender systems (Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems)

[MJ Ray]

Filipus Klutiero  wrote:
> MJ Ray wrote:
> > I consider filtered indices, auto-responses, shadow lists of only
> > "good" messages, highlighting, integration with db.debian.org and some
> > of the other uses for this data to be recommendation systems.
> >   
> A filtered thread index as proposed is not a recommendation list.

A filtered thread index as proposed could be a recommendation system
according to both descriptions posted, although it depends how one
interprets "suggest", "support" and so on, and how much
personalisation one believes is needed to be a recommendation system.

One can just as well see many drawbacks by looking at more general
"collaborative filtering" research - or even out into more general
population clustering work to see the reasons for the drawbacks - but
it's a bit older, so less of it is online, so I didn't refer to it.
I'm pretty sure that someone would react to the obvious problems in
using an unpersonalised filtered thread index (which is a
collaborative filter, isn't it?) by personalising it to make some sort
of simple recommendation system, wouldn't they?

Nevertheless, I now wish I hadn't tried to skip the above step,
because it's resulted in this pedantic subthread.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Re: Recommender systems (Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems)

[Filipus Klutiero]

MJ Ray wrote:

Filipus Klutiero  wrote:
> > Various messages in this thread have suggested using the votes as the
> > basis of a recommendation system for messages or authors.
> Ah, do you consider a "filtered thread index" as a recommendation list? 
> Else what do you consider as a recommendation list?
  

[...]

I consider filtered indices, auto-responses, shadow lists of only
"good" messages, highlighting, integration with db.debian.org and some
of the other uses for this data to be recommendation systems.
  

A filtered thread index as proposed is not a recommendation list.

Quoting http://dbis.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/index.php?project=2nd-Gen-RS

Recommender systems are personalization tools that intend to provide 
people with lists of suggestions that best reflect their individual 
taste. 


Quoting http://recsys.acm.org/
Recommender systems are software applications that aim to support 
users in their decision-making while interacting with large 
information spaces. They recommend items of interest to users based on 
preferences they have expressed, either explicitly or implicitly.



--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Recommender systems (Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems)

[MJ Ray]

Filipus Klutiero  wrote:
> > Various messages in this thread have suggested using the votes as the
> > basis of a recommendation system for messages or authors.
> Ah, do you consider a "filtered thread index" as a recommendation list? 
> Else what do you consider as a recommendation list?

Please take care to attribute quotes correctly.

I consider filtered indices, auto-responses, shadow lists of only
"good" messages, highlighting, integration with db.debian.org and some
of the other uses for this data to be recommendation systems.

Regards,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[MJ Ray]

George Danchev  wrote: [...]
> Well, I assume that the vote is a personal human right and that is common for 
> all the cultures out there (including regimes, since these peers are Debian 
> citizens after all, if any ?). So anyone can vote on his/her own. I believe 
> that is quite valid assumption, isn't it ? [...]

Well, some debian developers have explicitly argued against the project
supporting universal human rights (claiming they regard it as off-topic
- see http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2007/11/ for example),
so: no, I don't think that's a safe assumption without further work.

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Recommender systems (Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems)

[Filipus Klutiero]

Filipus Klutiero  wrote:
> > I see that http://www.grouplens.org has moved on and their research
> > (like http://www.grouplens.org/node/126 - "The recommendations that
> > are most accurate according to the standard metrics are sometimes not
> > the recommendations that are most useful to users") may be informative
> > for anyone who thinks that message-voting will surely work.
> >   
> Unless you're suggesting a recommendation system, I don't see how this 
> paper is relevant.


Various messages in this thread have suggested using the votes as the
basis of a recommendation system for messages or authors.
Ah, do you consider a "filtered thread index" as a recommendation list? 
Else what do you consider as a recommendation list?



--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[MJ Ray]

Filipus Klutiero  wrote:
> > I see that http://www.grouplens.org has moved on and their research
> > (like http://www.grouplens.org/node/126 - "The recommendations that
> > are most accurate according to the standard metrics are sometimes not
> > the recommendations that are most useful to users") may be informative
> > for anyone who thinks that message-voting will surely work.
> >   
> Unless you're suggesting a recommendation system, I don't see how this 
> paper is relevant.

Various messages in this thread have suggested using the votes as the
basis of a recommendation system for messages or authors.  I think
such a system would also exhibit the "similarity hole" mentioned in
that paper.  To be specific: it will prioritise what the voting groups
already know, over what would be most useful to the project.

However, that's just one example of the studies and - particularly if
you've never tried GroupLens or a similar system - several of the
papers are worth reading, illustrating the limits of item voting
systems and the challenges to overcome.  I believe those limits and
challenges mean that wider moderation/facilitation would be more
rewarding for the same effort.

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Filipus Klutiero]

Filipus Klutiero  wrote: [...]
> I'm not aware of any software with such a feature that would fit for 
> Debian. I also couldn't find any in a quick search. [...]


It sounded a lot like the old GroupLens usenet tool to me.
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/GroupLens.html
The big difference there was that it explicitly grouped your ratings
with those of other people who rated it the same way - there was not
the assumption of a common value system which seems to underlie this
proposal.
  
I never heard about GroupLens. From what I red on Wikipedia, Usenet is 
the only community discussion system to which collaborative filtering 
was applied. GroupLens is interesting, but I'm afraid porting it (if 
that makes any sense) to an Internet forum or mailing list would hardly 
save efforts on implementing something based on a CF library. That said, 
I don't think CF is at all necessary for a good message rating system, 
though data on the efficiency of CF in discussion systems would be 
interesting. I also don't think the idea proposed is opposed to CF; the 
existence of a median ("common") value does not prevent the generation 
of personalized ratings. For now I see CF as a cherry on the top.

I see that http://www.grouplens.org has moved on and their research
(like http://www.grouplens.org/node/126 - "The recommendations that
are most accurate according to the standard metrics are sometimes not
the recommendations that are most useful to users") may be informative
for anyone who thinks that message-voting will surely work.
  
Unless you're suggesting a recommendation system, I don't see how this 
paper is relevant.



--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[gregor herrmann]

On Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:47:41 -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote:

> So, are there going to be guide;lines for this voting on emails?
>  On /.,  when one moderates, there are clear labels: troll, off-topic,
>  flamebait, etc.

I think labels or tags would indeed be useful to have a structured
way of showing the cause for the complaint/praise.

And a bts-like implementation (forward the mail, add "tag $mid
off-topic" as a pseudo-header) should work well people used to working
with email a lot.

Cheers,
gregor 
-- 
 .''`.   Home: http://info.comodo.priv.at/{,blog/} / GPG Key ID: 0x00F3CFE4
 : :' :  Debian GNU/Linux user, admin, & developer - http://www.debian.org/
 `. `'   Member of VIBE!AT, SPI Inc., fellow of FSFE | http://got.to/quote/
   `-NP: Ludwig Hirsch: Die Weihnachtstraurigkeit


signature.asc
Description: Digital signature

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[George Danchev]

On Monday 22 December 2008 07:47:41 Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Hi,

Hi,

> So, are there going to be guide;lines for this voting on emails?

I'm afraid that I'm not able answer such a question, but I can try to provide 
a contra-argument (just to prove it wrong or maybe right) -- if we follow a 
strict and well written guide lines when voting then it is most likely that 
our votes would end up being the same, then why bother to vote at all if we 
already know the results ? ;-) or am I missing something here ?

>  On /.,  when one moderates, there are clear labels: troll, off-topic,
>  flamebait, etc. When we put in voting, would there be some guidelines
>  for what is or is not acceptable criteria for disapproving a message?
>
> Can people disapprove if a message is
>  - they disagree with the message?
>  - the author is french?
>  - The author's sexual orientation displeases them?
>  - the author is male?

Well, I assume that the vote is a personal human right and that is common for 
all the cultures out there (including regimes, since these peers are Debian 
citizens after all, if any ?). So anyone can vote on his/her own. I believe 
that is quite valid assumption, isn't it ?

> If there are such guidelines, will there be consequences to
>  wilful and prolonged  abuse of moderation guidelines? Is there going to
>  be meta moderation?
>
> I would have considered that these would fall under "common
>  sense" or "people are not insane" clauses, but I have recently heard
>  people on IRC professing that since they were not asked to accept the
>  constitution, just hte SC and the DFSG, they do not feel bound by
>  constitutional mandates, and thus can do whatever they want in their
>  activities in Debian.  I am scared that we might have arrived at the
>  point that unless there are strong guidelines and policies laid out
>  about voting, this mechanism is likely to be abused as well.

Hm, that is tricky, and I'm not sure how to comment on that.

-- 
pub 4096R/0E4BD0AB 2003-03-18 


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Jurij Smakov]

On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 01:49:44AM +, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 10:35:14AM +, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> > * "Vocal minority" dominates "silent majority" by contributing a 
> > disproportionate amount of list traffic, [...]
> 
> Note that voting can have a similar drawback -- in that if you've got
> enough like-minded people voting for a particular viewpoint (eg, "Joe
> Random sucks, give him what for!") people with a different viewpoint
> (eg, "stop berating people, argh") aren't going to bother voting ("the
> score's already +50, why bother with a -1?"). This seems to happen on
> digg a fair bit. Probably someting to be aware of.

It is a good point, however the original idea was only supposed to 
address the issue of rude/offensive/inflammatory/useless posts on the 
lists (at least, that was my impression), not provide a voting forum 
for particular viewpoints. Thus, it would be wrong for people to vote 
down valid, constructive posts, expressing the opinions which they 
happen to disagree with. Of course, there are multiple ways to abuse 
this system, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt, 
that's why I would like to avoid getting involved in the 
interpretation, at least for now.

Best regards,
-- 
Jurij Smakov   ju...@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/  KeyID: C99E03CC


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Charles Plessy]

Le Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 01:31:31AM -0500, Filipus Klutiero a écrit :
> A long exchange between two people can be interesting, or not.

Hi Filipus,

it is exactly because it can not be known if a long exchange is interesting
before reading it that tools to ignore long exchanges can be useful. The mere
action of deleting tons of cross-posted fragmented threads is time-consuming,
expecially for people like me who read -devel as a digest and -vote as regular
subscription (hidden message to some posters: I beg, implore and supplicate you
to stop cross-posting).

If a long exchange is interesting, then it can be summarised. If no summary is
made, then the exchange was probably anecdotical. It can be interesting like a
TCV documentary is, but should be skippable with no important information loss. 

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[MJ Ray]

Filipus Klutiero  wrote: [...]
> I'm not aware of any software with such a feature that would fit for 
> Debian. I also couldn't find any in a quick search. [...]

It sounded a lot like the old GroupLens usenet tool to me.
http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/GroupLens.html
The big difference there was that it explicitly grouped your ratings
with those of other people who rated it the same way - there was not
the assumption of a common value system which seems to underlie this
proposal.

I see that http://www.grouplens.org has moved on and their research
(like http://www.grouplens.org/node/126 - "The recommendations that
are most accurate according to the standard metrics are sometimes not
the recommendations that are most useful to users") may be informative
for anyone who thinks that message-voting will surely work.

Hope that helps,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[MJ Ray]

George Danchev  wrote:
> On Saturday 20 December 2008 21:33:27 MJ Ray wrote:
> > So, people who remain on the debian mailing lists have a poor
> > understanding of what should appear a good mailing list, 
>
> What makes you think that "vocal minority" is larger than "silent majority" 
> in 
> debian mailing lists?  If the "silent majority" has decent means to evaluate 
> the traffic of the mailing list (i.e. by means of voting messages for 
> example) then I believe it will do it happily, or at least chances to do so 
> increase dramatically.

Show me the numbers.  I believe that the current "silent majority" is
by definition silent and most of it will continue to be silent,
watching lists just in case something useful appears and refusing to
participate in improving the lists, as they have so far.  Meanwhile,
the vocal minorities will continue to be vocal and so more
enthusiastic (ab?)users of any Whuffie system which is implemented.

> > but having 
> > those same people express their opinion about what is good on a
> > mailing list will improve matters?  
>
> Which people you think should express their opinion about what is good on a 
> debian mailing lists:
>
> * debian mailing list participants
> * external observers, who has no clue nor care about the list traffic

I'm glad to see the implicit agreement that only list *participants*
would take part in this scheme.

But that is a false dilemma.  I believe lists should be facilitated by
good mailing list participants selected by the general debian
developer population, as I have suggested for years.
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/blog/2006/debian#listmoderators

> > In short, we are going to use 
> > the "buggy" list memberships's views to repair the lists?
>
> I see no repairs here, just means to evaluate the content which hopefully 
> might gain a self-improving system based on the gathered data. Those who 
> supply the data, are these who consume its results... see the motivation ?

I see the feedback loop potential.  I can't see what would motivate
people to support adding a feedback loop to buggy lists.

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Filipus Klutiero]

Note that voting can have a similar drawback -- in that if you've got
enough like-minded people voting for a particular viewpoint (eg, "Joe
Random sucks, give him what for!") people with a different viewpoint
(eg, "stop berating people, argh") aren't going to bother voting ("the
score's already +50, why bother with a -1?"). This seems to happen on
digg a fair bit. Probably someting to be aware of.
  
People using the data will set their own interest threshold, just like 
you set yourself how much you rely on your spam filter. If the rating 
system is to be officially adopted, a per-reader filter threshold will 
IMO be a requirement. Therefore, going from +1 to -1 won't make the 
message disappear for everyone. It's possible that going from 50 to 49 
will hide the message to those with the least interest in the list. 
Anyway, it shouldn't take much more time to vote than to look at what 
the current score is, so I don't think the term "bother" is adequate.


If what you're fearing is that a "voting majority" would be featured 
prominently at the expense of a non-voting minority, it's possible for 
the minority to ignore the ratings. The system stays helpful to the 
majority.

Anyway, another idea I was pondering, was having "posting credits". Everyone
gets, say, five a month, and whenever they make a post, they use one up. _But_,
everytime you get a reply to a post you made, critical or complimentary, you
get one back.
I don't like this idea. With a good rating system in place, "posting 
credits" would be essentially useless. This is some kind of passive 
reputation system. The proposal goes beyond a reputation system, with 
per-message ratings.

Benefits:

  - rate limits people, rather than censoring them. got a lot
to say? if you can say it in one post a week, rather than a hundred,
you're set. if people think you're intersting, it's easy for them
to follow what you've got to say, if people think you're boring,
it's easy to ignore you
  
Rather than censoring? The only case that could be considered censoring 
on Debian mailing lists I can remember is the ban of Sven Luther 
announced on http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2007/05/msg00234.html
I requested this ban to be lifted and the only reason this may persist I 
can see is the lack of manpower in the mailing lists team.


Furthermore, there would not have been any temptation to ban Sven with a 
proper reputation system.

  - allows discussions to happen (I say something, you reply, I reply
to you, you reply to me, etc, and I've spent one credit, and we just
keep swapping the other one)
  

Well, we already have discussions happening...

  - discourages people from "feeding the energy beast" -- replying to
trolls then *technically* enables them to post more not just socially
(and likewise prevents you posting on other subjects technically,
not just due to the distraction); so unless you've got something
you *really* want to add, your best way to shut someone stupid up
is just to ignore them (both technically and socially)
I guess you could see it like that. Another way to see this is that 
posting credits would be ineffective if people "feed the energy beast".



That said, the main reason I don't like this idea is that I'm very 
skeptic that the value of people's post declines past a certain number 
of unanswered posts (ignoring spam). I'd like to see statistics or some 
supporting evidence.



--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Filipus Klutiero]

Just to add to the brainstorm, an incremental counter measuring how many emails
one person sent to the list in a 24-h window could be very useful to directly
ignore people when they start to play ping-pong.
I doubt it. I'd like to see evidence that posting patterns can 
efficiently estimate the interest of a message (besides spam, of 
course). I wonder what you have in mind with "playing ping-pong". A long 
exchange between two people can be interesting, or not. The proposal 
already suggests a [potentially] good way to estimate the interest, I 
don't see why we'd need such heuristics too.



--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Manoj Srivastava]

Hi,

So, are there going to be guide;lines for this voting on emails?
 On /.,  when one moderates, there are clear labels: troll, off-topic,
 flamebait, etc. When we put in voting, would there be some guidelines
 for what is or is not acceptable criteria for disapproving a message?

Can people disapprove if a message is
 - they disagree with the message?
 - the author is french?
 - The author's sexual orientation displeases them?
 - the author is male?

If there are such guidelines, will there be consequences to
 wilful and prolonged  abuse of moderation guidelines? Is there going to
 be meta moderation? 

I would have considered that these would fall under "common
 sense" or "people are not insane" clauses, but I have recently heard
 people on IRC professing that since they were not asked to accept the
 constitution, just hte SC and the DFSG, they do not feel bound by
 constitutional mandates, and thus can do whatever they want in their
 activities in Debian.  I am scared that we might have arrived at the
 point that unless there are strong guidelines and policies laid out
 about voting, this mechanism is likely to be abused as well.

manoj
-- 
A fool and his money are soon popular.
Manoj Srivastava    
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B  924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Filipus Klutiero]

It would be great to see voting/scoring/rating of messages implemented.

Like Russ, I doubt that implementing this would be worth it inside the 
email paradigm. Whatever approach you choose, keep in mind Debian is 
only one of the projects that could benefit from such a system. I admit 
I'm not aware of any software with such a feature that would fit for 
Debian. I also couldn't find any in a quick search. MyBB has a 
reputation system, which could be a small part of a rating system for 
Debian forums. If it's not already done, I wish it would be something 
clean and flexible that can be shared with other communities.



--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[George Danchev]

On Sunday 21 December 2008 23:12:08 Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 10:35:14AM +, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> > Now, I know that for a bunch of geeks like us it is very tempting to
> > start discussing the technical details and how the scoring is
> > going to be implemented, and how the results are going to be used,
> > and so on. The way I would like to see this idea developing is that it
> > starts as an unofficial project, with very simple rules (like, "you
> > can vote once for each message ID"), which simply collects the data
> > and makes it publicly available in some way. Interested parties and
> > individuals can then use the data to provide their own metrics (and
> > try to convince others that their way of calculating the mailing list
> > "karma" is the right one). Eventually, we should be able to settle on
> > one authoritative way of calculating it, which can become "official",
> > and used to develop procedures for warning the offensive posters that
> > their behaviour is considered disruptive, for example.
>
> To reiterate my point from IRC Friday, I don't think the described system
> is at all useful *unless* we agree on a means by which strong community
> disapproval of the poster's mails has consequences for that person's
> posting privileges.  I think by this point, the people whose mails I
> disapprove of know it ;), so what's the benefit to me in spending time
> ranking their mails in a system that's advisory?

While you clearly know whether you approve or disapprove a given message, what 
you don't know or can't be 100% sure is whether your decision belongs to the 
subset of the majority or to the subset of the minority, thus having the "big 
picture" would address that at some point (i.e. one's own decision could be 
very wrong whether another's message is good or bad). In that case peer's 
decision would be corrected by the community.

> Furthermore, there are built-in rewards for people to continue posting,
> despite knowing that some number of developers disapprove of their posts:
>
> - it gives them an opportunity to try to persuade the "audience" of
>   undecideds
> - it increases the chances that the disapprovers will give up and go away,
>   which can be seen as a "win" if the disapproval is mutual
> - it gives them a chance to have the last word

This is possible indeed, and I guess the community may want to vote in order 
to decide what to do with such a case. I think I prefer the system to be 
advisory by default, and only extremely severe cases to be decided (voted?) 
on a case-by-case basis by the community.

-- 
pub 4096R/0E4BD0AB 2003-03-18 


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Ben Finney]

Steve Langasek  writes:

> To reiterate my point from IRC Friday, I don't think the described
> system is at all useful *unless* we agree on a means by which strong
> community disapproval of the poster's mails has consequences for
> that person's posting privileges. I think by this point, the people
> whose mails I disapprove of know it ;), so what's the benefit to me
> in spending time ranking their mails in a system that's advisory?

As I understand the original proposal posted here, one benefit is that
such expressions of disapproval are moved out of band. Another is that
they are automatically aggregated for reference.

-- 
 \ “If you're a horse, and someone gets on you, and falls off, and |
  `\  then gets right back on you, I think you should buck him off |
_o__)right away.” —Jack Handey |
Ben Finney


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Steve Langasek]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 10:35:14AM +, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> Now, I know that for a bunch of geeks like us it is very tempting to 
> start discussing the technical details and how the scoring is  
> going to be implemented, and how the results are going to be used, 
> and so on. The way I would like to see this idea developing is that it 
> starts as an unofficial project, with very simple rules (like, "you 
> can vote once for each message ID"), which simply collects the data 
> and makes it publicly available in some way. Interested parties and 
> individuals can then use the data to provide their own metrics (and 
> try to convince others that their way of calculating the mailing list 
> "karma" is the right one). Eventually, we should be able to settle on 
> one authoritative way of calculating it, which can become "official", 
> and used to develop procedures for warning the offensive posters that 
> their behaviour is considered disruptive, for example.

To reiterate my point from IRC Friday, I don't think the described system
is at all useful *unless* we agree on a means by which strong community
disapproval of the poster's mails has consequences for that person's posting
privileges.  I think by this point, the people whose mails I disapprove of
know it ;), so what's the benefit to me in spending time ranking their mails
in a system that's advisory?

Furthermore, there are built-in rewards for people to continue posting,
despite knowing that some number of developers disapprove of their posts:

- it gives them an opportunity to try to persuade the "audience" of
  undecideds
- it increases the chances that the disapprovers will give up and go away,
  which can be seen as a "win" if the disapproval is mutual
- it gives them a chance to have the last word

Since we're discussing this in the first place, I think it's a given that we
think peer pressure is not adequately offsetting these rewards, so to
improve the quality of our list discussions, some other deterrent seems to
be required.

Finding a deterrent that's both effective and agreeable to the project is
the hard part, so I think that's where we need to focus our attention, not
on implementing the raw infrastructure that enables users to vote mails up
or down.

AJ's suggestion of a "cap and trade" system for mailing list posts is an
interesting one, but do we really have a clear idea what the monthly quotas
should be?  Further, if everyone has fixed quotas, that implies abusers /
malcontents get to send a fixed number of messages per month before they're
cut off; and that a minority of two is enough to keep a noxious thread
going.  Is there really a constant threshold that is going to be high enough
to let relevant discussions take place, while also being low enough to
dampen unhealthy discussions?

The alternative I still favor is to allow up/down votes on individual mails
to be fed into an overall "score" for the poster, taking into consideration
such factors as: the number of people disapproving of individual mails, the
breadth of disapproval of the poster's mails overall (i.e.: 10 "down" votes
from a single developer should weight less than 10 "down" votes from 10
different developers), the age of the messages (probably by clock time, with
exponential dropoff), and the amount of /approval/ of the messages in
question.  Then, below a certain threshold, we block mails from that poster.
Effectively this is a rate limit, since the score will change over time due
to aging of the data.  It does leave open the possibility of a crapflood
from one person posting a huge number of messages before anyone has a chance
to respond with scoring, but on the flipside, doing this gives us more
source data to use as a basis for banning them even longer since there are
more messages available to use in scoring.

If this seems too fiddly, I'm happy for us to at least give AJ's solution a
try first.

-- 
Steve Langasek   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developerhttp://www.debian.org/
slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Raphael Hertzog]

On Sun, 21 Dec 2008, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 10:35:14AM +, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> > * "Vocal minority" dominates "silent majority" by contributing a 
> > disproportionate amount of list traffic, [...]
> 
> Note that voting can have a similar drawback -- in that if you've got
> enough like-minded people voting for a particular viewpoint (eg, "Joe
> Random sucks, give him what for!") people with a different viewpoint
> (eg, "stop berating people, argh") aren't going to bother voting ("the
> score's already +50, why bother with a -1?"). This seems to happen on
> digg a fair bit. Probably someting to be aware of.

Contrary to digg, a discussion offers multiple opportunities to vote
because there are several messages and each one defends a particular
viewpoint.

Would it make sense to use positive rating for the content
of messages ("me too") and negative rating to tag messages which have been
too rude/impolite or even off-topic ?

That way there's no “battle” between +1 and -1 raters. 

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog

Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 05:41:48PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> > m, this is risky and an important point: do we want the
> > information to be publicly available or not? The initial proposal
> The initial mail said that clearly at least: “which simply collects
> the data and makes it publicly available in some way”

Yup, fair enough, you're right.
... and it also actually looks like the correct approach: just collect
the data and made them available, we will find way to use it :)

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime


signature.asc
Description: Digital signature

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[George Danchev]

On Sunday 21 December 2008 03:49:44 Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 10:35:14AM +, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> > * "Vocal minority" dominates "silent majority" by contributing a
> > disproportionate amount of list traffic, [...]
>
> Note that voting can have a similar drawback -- in that if you've got
> enough like-minded people voting for a particular viewpoint (eg, "Joe
> Random sucks, give him what for!") people with a different viewpoint
> (eg, "stop berating people, argh") aren't going to bother voting ("the
> score's already +50, why bother with a -1?"). This seems to happen on
> digg a fair bit. Probably someting to be aware of.

That is a reasonable remark indeed, and I imagine that such a drawback could 
be alleviated by postponing the voting results (predefined voting period like 
one day/week/month?), so that peers vote independently and remain 
uninfluenced by the other's votes. I.e. voting periods following the manner 
of the real Debian votes.

> Anyway, another idea I was pondering, was having "posting credits".
> Everyone gets, say, five a month, and whenever they make a post, they use
> one up. _But_, everytime you get a reply to a post you made, critical or
> complimentary, you get one back. Benefits:

This is also a very good idea. 

The only thing I'm a little bit afraid of is that most of the people (me 
included) who discuss that topic were not or hardly being trained in "studing 
the opinion of the society" or whatever the name of such a discipline is... 
so relying on already proven methods like voting is probably a good idea.

-- 
pub 4096R/0E4BD0AB 2003-03-18 


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Anthony Towns]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 10:35:14AM +, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> * "Vocal minority" dominates "silent majority" by contributing a 
> disproportionate amount of list traffic, [...]

Note that voting can have a similar drawback -- in that if you've got
enough like-minded people voting for a particular viewpoint (eg, "Joe
Random sucks, give him what for!") people with a different viewpoint
(eg, "stop berating people, argh") aren't going to bother voting ("the
score's already +50, why bother with a -1?"). This seems to happen on
digg a fair bit. Probably someting to be aware of.

Anyway, another idea I was pondering, was having "posting credits". Everyone
gets, say, five a month, and whenever they make a post, they use one up. _But_,
everytime you get a reply to a post you made, critical or complimentary, you
get one back. Benefits:

  - rate limits people, rather than censoring them. got a lot
to say? if you can say it in one post a week, rather than a hundred,
you're set. if people think you're intersting, it's easy for them
to follow what you've got to say, if people think you're boring,
it's easy to ignore you

  - allows discussions to happen (I say something, you reply, I reply
to you, you reply to me, etc, and I've spent one credit, and we just
keep swapping the other one)

  - discourages people from "feeding the energy beast" -- replying to
trolls then *technically* enables them to post more not just socially
(and likewise prevents you posting on other subjects technically,
not just due to the distraction); so unless you've got something
you *really* want to add, your best way to shut someone stupid up
is just to ignore them (both technically and socially)

Optionally: also allow people to give someone else one of their credits
without posting a "+1". Maybe also limit who can get the five credits
a month (eg, DDs, DMs, people recommended by someone with credits),
so random anonymous trolls with throwaway accounts have to get vetted
first, before posting.

Cheers,
aj


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Michael Banck]

On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 09:38:56AM +1100, Ben Finney wrote:
> George Danchev  writes:
> 
> > On Saturday 20 December 2008 21:33:27 MJ Ray wrote:
> > > So, people who remain on the debian mailing lists have a poor
> > > understanding of what should appear a good mailing list,
> > 
> > What makes you think that "vocal minority" is larger than "silent
> > majority" in debian mailing lists?
> 
> The premise of the original poster (Jurij Smakov) was that the vocal
> minority dominates the mailing list discussions.

I think th premise of George was that "vocal minority" vs. "silent
majority" are different in terms of people posting to lists and people
scoring list posts.  I.e., while it is obvious that the "silent
majority" is pretty silent when it comes to posting to lists, they are
(by definition) reading the list and might score/vote the messages
because it does not publically add to the list.


Michael


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Ben Finney]

George Danchev  writes:

> On Saturday 20 December 2008 21:33:27 MJ Ray wrote:
> > So, people who remain on the debian mailing lists have a poor
> > understanding of what should appear a good mailing list,
> 
> What makes you think that "vocal minority" is larger than "silent
> majority" in debian mailing lists?

The premise of the original poster (Jurij Smakov) was that the vocal
minority dominates the mailing list discussions.

-- 
 \“The Bermuda Triangle got tired of warm weather. It moved to |
  `\   Alaska. Now Santa Claus is missing.” —Steven Wright |
_o__)  |
Ben Finney


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Ben Pfaff]

Florian Weimer  writes:

> * MJ Ray:
>
>> Jurij Smakov  wrote: [...]
>>> So, what can we do about? During a little brainstorming session on IRC 
>>> last night a following idea has emerged: let's have a way to express 
>>> our opinion about the mailing list posts. [...]
>>
>> So, people who remain on the debian mailing lists have a poor
>> understanding of what should appear a good mailing list, but having
>> those same people express their opinion about what is good on a
>> mailing list will improve matters?  In short, we are going to use
>> the "buggy" list memberships's views to repair the lists?
>
> The proposal just assumes that there is a sufficiently large number of
> readers who feed the moderation database.  This looks like a
> reasonable assumption to me.

I agree: I read far more of the Debian mailing list messages than
I ever reply to.  (No point in sending lots of "me too" responses
to the messages that I appreciate.)  I personally would be far
more likely to contribute feedback through this mechanism than to
reply to messages.
-- 
"Mon peu de succès près des femmes est toujours venu de les trop aimer."
--Jean-Jacques Rousseau


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Florian Weimer]

* MJ Ray:

> Jurij Smakov  wrote: [...]
>> So, what can we do about? During a little brainstorming session on IRC 
>> last night a following idea has emerged: let's have a way to express 
>> our opinion about the mailing list posts. [...]
>
> So, people who remain on the debian mailing lists have a poor
> understanding of what should appear a good mailing list, but having
> those same people express their opinion about what is good on a
> mailing list will improve matters?  In short, we are going to use
> the "buggy" list memberships's views to repair the lists?

The proposal just assumes that there is a sufficiently large number of
readers who feed the moderation database.  This looks like a
reasonable assumption to me.

What I like about this proposal is that it will separate those who are
merely obnoxious in terms of behavior in mailing list discussions, and
those who intent to disrupt our community, for whatever reason, using
whatever means it takes.

I don't particularly like the policy implications, but if most data is
published (maybe after slight anonymiziation) and the scoring is done
locally, it should be fairly transparent and hard to abuse with good
intentions.  (I worry mor about misuse by well-meaning project
members, the lunatic fringe won't care anyway.)


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[George Danchev]

On Saturday 20 December 2008 21:33:27 MJ Ray wrote:
> Jurij Smakov  wrote: [...]
>
> > So, what can we do about? During a little brainstorming session on IRC
> > last night a following idea has emerged: let's have a way to express
> > our opinion about the mailing list posts. [...]
>
> So, people who remain on the debian mailing lists have a poor
> understanding of what should appear a good mailing list, 

What makes you think that "vocal minority" is larger than "silent majority" in 
debian mailing lists? If the "silent majority" has decent means to evaluate 
the traffic of the mailing list (i.e. by means of voting messages for 
example) then I believe it will do it happily, or at least chances to do so 
increase dramatically.

> but having 
> those same people express their opinion about what is good on a
> mailing list will improve matters?  

Which people you think should express their opinion about what is good on a 
debian mailing lists:

* debian mailing list participants
* external observers, who has no clue nor care about the list traffic

> In short, we are going to use 
> the "buggy" list memberships's views to repair the lists?

I see no repairs here, just means to evaluate the content which hopefully 
might gain a self-improving system based on the gathered data. Those who 
supply the data, are these who consume its results... see the motivation ?

-- 
pub 4096R/0E4BD0AB 2003-03-18 


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[MJ Ray]

Jurij Smakov  wrote: [...]
> So, what can we do about? During a little brainstorming session on IRC 
> last night a following idea has emerged: let's have a way to express 
> our opinion about the mailing list posts. [...]

So, people who remain on the debian mailing lists have a poor
understanding of what should appear a good mailing list, but having
those same people express their opinion about what is good on a
mailing list will improve matters?  In short, we are going to use
the "buggy" list memberships's views to repair the lists?

Why would it do that, rather than form a feedback loop and further
divide the lists, encouraging the "vocal minorities" to engage in
anonymised risk-free backstabbing of each other?  Are you proposing a
simultaneous "come back and rate the mailing lists" campaign or some
other action to activate the "silent majority"?

> one authoritative way of calculating it, which can become "official", 
> and used to develop procedures for warning the offensive posters that 
> their behaviour is considered disruptive, for example.

So this is even suggested to become a type of Whuffie?
Did I miss the point of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom?
http://craphound.com/?p=147

Amazed,
-- 
MJR/slef
My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/
Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Russ Allbery]

Stefano Zacchiroli  writes:
> On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 10:35:14AM +, Jurij Smakov wrote:

>> It is generally perceived that there are currently a couple of
>> problems with the way discussions happen on our mailing lists:

> I'm not sure yet if I like the idea, but for sure it is an intriguing
> one, thanks for pushing it through! I'll for sure follow its
> evolution.

Likewise!  It's a rather fascinating idea that echoes the way that
moderation is frequently done these days in large and very busy web fora.
I'm not sure that the idea will translate into e-mail, but I'm not sure
that it *won't* either, and it's proven reasonably effective at
highlighting interesting messages elsewhere.

> Now, I like your mechanism way more than moderation, because yours is
> self-regulating. Still, a problem I spotted with the shadow list also
> affects your mechanism, namely: context loss. What if a very
> bad/unpolite/rude/useless message gets scored down (which is quite
> probable) whether a nice/constructive/ polite response to it gets scored
> up (which is as probable)? People only following the "good" messages
> will experience context loss receiving a reply to a message they are
> missing.

Surprisingly (at least to me), in the few fora that I read this way, I
don't really miss the context.

I'm not sure that such a system is ever going to be a replacement for
people who read all of debian-devel or the like now.  What it may be
instead is a way for people who have unsubscribed from the full traffic to
see only the most interesting bits.  Sort of another digest sitting
between the full list traffic and developer news.

-- 
Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org)   


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Jurij Smakov]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 05:02:23PM +0100, David Paleino wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Dec 2008 10:35:14 +, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> 
> > I believe that at this point Nick Rusnov, John Goerzen and myself have 
> > expressed interest in working on the first stage of the project. If 
> > you have any ideas or comments - please share, we would also welcome 
> > your contribution if you decide to help out with it.
> 
> I might be interested in joining too, but unfortunately I don't have a very
> stable internet connection (apart from two weeks starting from today). Would
> you mind setting up a wiki page with implementation details? Or a mailing 
> list?
> Or anything else?

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who has offered their 
insights. I've heard only one negative comment so far, and in 
response I would like to reiterate that the only current goal is to 
collect the data, the effort is driven by a small group of people, and 
not officially endorsed by the Debian project as a whole in any way. 
When/if the project will decide that this data can be potentially 
useful for some official purpose, I'm sure that every DD will be given 
a chance to express their opinion about it.

Another point is that most people are probably going to be pretty busy 
with holiday stuff over the last couple of weeks (I'm leaving for a 
two-week vacation myself tomorrow), so we'll have to get back to 
implementation details in the New Year. I was thinking about creating 
an Alioth project for it, but I'm open to other ideas.

Best regards,
-- 
Jurij Smakov   ju...@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/  KeyID: C99E03CC


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Charles Plessy]

Le Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 07:12:15PM +0200, Teemu Likonen a écrit :
> 
> Maybe even add an additional header to mailing-list posts, like
> "X-Debian-Author-Karma: +234". OK, maybe not. It's not terribly reliable
> on public mailing lists because users can change their From addresses as
> they want. But at least on readers' side this would make configuring
> email clients rather easy.

Just to add to the brainstorm, an incremental counter measuring how many emails
one person sent to the list in a 24-h window could be very useful to directly
ignore people when they start to play ping-pong.
 
Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Teemu Likonen]

Raphael Hertzog (2008-12-20 17:41 +0100) wrote:

> On Sat, 20 Dec 2008, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
>> seemed to be more oriented to scoring single posts, while here you
>> are kind of inheriting a score on the poster from his posts. They are
>> two quite different approaches.
>
> They are different but if the data is available, it's also relatively
> easy to imagine ways to do that.

Maybe even add an additional header to mailing-list posts, like
"X-Debian-Author-Karma: +234". OK, maybe not. It's not terribly reliable
on public mailing lists because users can change their From addresses as
they want. But at least on readers' side this would make configuring
email clients rather easy.


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Raphael Hertzog]

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> [ re-ordering the quoted text, anticipating your reply to my post ]
> 
> On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 04:35:43PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> > The goal is not (necessarily to) filter the messages that we want to
> > see or not, the goal is to give feedback to contributors so that
> > they know if their messages were in line or not with what people
> > expect on the list.  The hope is that contributors will try to avoid
> > doing the same mistake once that many people pointed it out
> > explicitely.
> 
> Well, I think both are reasonable goals, aren't they?

Yup.

> > - having such a mechanism not only helps posters to be aware that their
> >   messages are causing troubles, it also helps newcomers to better
> >   identify the problematic contributors and they might avoid starting an
> >   argument with them.
> 
> m, this is risky and an important point: do we want the
> information to be publicly available or not? The initial proposal

The initial mail said that clearly at least: “which simply collects the data
and makes it publicly available in some way”

> seemed to be more oriented to scoring single posts, while here you are
> kind of inheriting a score on the poster from his posts. They are two
> quite different approaches.

They are different but if the data is available, it's also relatively easy
to imagine ways to do that.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog

Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

[ re-ordering the quoted text, anticipating your reply to my post ]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 04:35:43PM +0100, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> The goal is not (necessarily to) filter the messages that we want to
> see or not, the goal is to give feedback to contributors so that
> they know if their messages were in line or not with what people
> expect on the list.  The hope is that contributors will try to avoid
> doing the same mistake once that many people pointed it out
> explicitely.

Well, I think both are reasonable goals, aren't they?

But you correctly spotted that I completely overlooked the "feedback
to posters" goal (BTW, was it clear in the original proposal?), while
now that you make me think about it I agree it is possibly more
interesting.

> Various remarks:
> - making data available doesn't mean that people will regularly follow
>   them, there must be a mechanism to inform the contributor when a threshold
>   has been reached so that they are informed that many people found their
>   messages objectionable

Agreed, even though I wouldn't like starting to mail people about
their feedback scores; I'm quite sure many people would find that
unacceptable. Eventually, it can be integrated behind db.debian.org,
but here we are starting to drift towards the "let's discuss the
technical bits", while it is definitely too early.

> - classifying in good/bad is not enough, we need to be able to express
>   what we find incorrect (personal attacks, too many replies that repeat
>   the same thing, improper vocabulary, …)

I disagree. As a figure good/bad is enough, though for sure you want
to enable people to comment *why* the gave a given score. Given that
the suggested mechanism is mail forwarding it is quite easy to achieve
that a-la BTS.

> - having such a mechanism not only helps posters to be aware that their
>   messages are causing troubles, it also helps newcomers to better
>   identify the problematic contributors and they might avoid starting an
>   argument with them.

m, this is risky and an important point: do we want the
information to be publicly available or not? The initial proposal
seemed to be more oriented to scoring single posts, while here you are
kind of inheriting a score on the poster from his posts. They are two
quite different approaches.

> - mutt macros can be written to make it handy for us to quickly give
>   feedback

ACK.

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime


signature.asc
Description: Digital signature

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[David Paleino]

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008 10:35:14 +, Jurij Smakov wrote:

> I believe that at this point Nick Rusnov, John Goerzen and myself have 
> expressed interest in working on the first stage of the project. If 
> you have any ideas or comments - please share, we would also welcome 
> your contribution if you decide to help out with it.

I might be interested in joining too, but unfortunately I don't have a very
stable internet connection (apart from two weeks starting from today). Would
you mind setting up a wiki page with implementation details? Or a mailing list?
Or anything else?

Kindly,
David

-- 
 . ''`.  Debian maintainer | http://wiki.debian.org/DavidPaleino
 : :'  : Linuxer #334216 --|-- http://www.hanskalabs.net/
 `. `'`  GPG: 1392B174 | http://snipr.com/qa_page
   `-   2BAB C625 4E66 E7B8 450A C3E1 E6AA 9017 1392 B174


signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Raphael Hertzog]

Hello,

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> and so on. The way I would like to see this idea developing is that it 
> starts as an unofficial project, with very simple rules (like, "you 
> can vote once for each message ID"), which simply collects the data 
> and makes it publicly available in some way. Interested parties and 
> individuals can then use the data to provide their own metrics (and 
> try to convince others that their way of calculating the mailing list 
> "karma" is the right one). Eventually, we should be able to settle on 
> one authoritative way of calculating it, which can become "official", 
> and used to develop procedures for warning the offensive posters that 
> their behaviour is considered disruptive, for example.
> 
> I believe that at this point Nick Rusnov, John Goerzen and myself have 
> expressed interest in working on the first stage of the project. If 
> you have any ideas or comments - please share, we would also welcome 
> your contribution if you decide to help out with it.

I agree it's worth trying (I also came to a similar proposal several times
when I tried to imagine how to give feedback to people who are starting to
cause troubles with their behaviour on lists). I'm not at all convinced
that it will work or be useful, but I really don't have a better idea.
Depending on your implementation choices, I might be able to help a bit.
Keep me in the loop.

Various remarks:
- making data available doesn't mean that people will regularly follow
  them, there must be a mechanism to inform the contributor when a threshold
  has been reached so that they are informed that many people found their
  messages objectionable
- classifying in good/bad is not enough, we need to be able to express
  what we find incorrect (personal attacks, too many replies that repeat
  the same thing, improper vocabulary, …)
- having such a mechanism not only helps posters to be aware that their
  messages are causing troubles, it also helps newcomers to better
  identify the problematic contributors and they might avoid starting an
  argument with them.
- later on, depending on how it works, the listmasters might want to hook
  up some filters on this data so that someome who repeats himself too
  much is blocked during 24h to post in the same list (for example)
- mutt macros can be written to make it handy for us to quickly
  give feedback

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> Now, I like your mechanism way more than moderation, because yours is
> self-regulating. Still, a problem I spotted with the shadow list also
> affects your mechanism, namely: context loss. What if a very
> bad/unpolite/rude/useless message gets scored down (which is quite
> probable) whether a nice/constructive/ polite response to it gets
> scored up (which is as probable)? People only following the "good"
> messages will experience context loss receiving a reply to a message
> they are missing.

The goal is not (necessarily to) filter the messages that we want to see
or not, the goal is to give feedback to contributors so that they know if
their messages were in line or not with what people expect on the list.
The hope is that contributors will try to avoid doing the same mistake
once that many people pointed it out explicitely.

> In a sense, it seems to me that the mechanism work properly only if we
> switch in mass to it.

Not sure, but it's surely more representative if many people use it.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog

Le best-seller français mis à jour pour Debian Etch :
http://www.ouaza.com/livre/admin-debian/


-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org

Re: Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 10:35:14AM +, Jurij Smakov wrote:
> It is generally perceived that there are currently a couple of
> problems with the way discussions happen on our mailing lists:

I'm not sure yet if I like the idea, but for sure it is an intriguing
one, thanks for pushing it through! I'll for sure follow its
evolution.

> I believe that at this point Nick Rusnov, John Goerzen and myself
> have expressed interest in working on the first stage of the
> project. If you have any ideas or comments - please share, we would
> also welcome your contribution if you decide to help out with it.

For weird reasons, yesterday I thought about something similar, but
with a worst key idea behind it than yours. (Note that I'm _not_
actually proposing what follows, read on.) I was simply thinking at a
moderated shadow list for -devel (or whatever other list), to which
people can independently subscribe. Each post to the shadow list goes
to -devel, each post to -devel goes to the shadow list but it is
subject to moderation.

Now, I like your mechanism way more than moderation, because yours is
self-regulating. Still, a problem I spotted with the shadow list also
affects your mechanism, namely: context loss. What if a very
bad/unpolite/rude/useless message gets scored down (which is quite
probable) whether a nice/constructive/ polite response to it gets
scored up (which is as probable)? People only following the "good"
messages will experience context loss receiving a reply to a message
they are missing.

In a sense, it seems to me that the mechanism work properly only if we
switch in mass to it.

It is probably a negligible problem and I don't think it hinders
attempting an implementation of your idea, but still I'm curious if
you've thought about it and came to a solution.

Cheers.

-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
z...@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..|  .  |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie
sempre uno zaino ...| ..: | Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime


signature.asc
Description: Digital signature

Voting on messages: a way to resolve the mailing list problems

[Jurij Smakov]

Hi,

It is generally perceived that there are currently a couple of 
problems with the way discussions happen on our mailing lists:

* Some people are put off from participating in the discussions 
on important topics because they are not willing to expose themselves 
to offensive behaviour and personal attacks, which, unfortunately, is 
seen more and more often on our lists;

and

* "Vocal minority" dominates "silent majority" by contributing a 
disproportionate amount of list traffic, not necessarily expressing 
the opinion of the project as a whole and, effectively, blocking other 
active contributors, not willing to engage in flame wars, from voicing 
their opinion.

Existing mechanisms (such as GRs and requesting mailing lists bans for 
certain individuals) are clearly not efficient in dealing with these 
problems, both due to them being considered exceptional measures and 
inadequacy of these tools for solving social problems. I have also 
seen opinions that other "obvious" ways of addressing the issue, 
such as moderation of the lists or a new organizational entity, which 
would act as a list watchdog, is not the way to go, as it adds yet 
another layer of bureacracy and raises the usual questions of choosing 
the "right" people for the privileged position.

So, what can we do about? During a little brainstorming session on IRC 
last night a following idea has emerged: let's have a way to express 
our opinion about the mailing list posts. The proposed implementation 
is straightforward: you can "vote" a particular mailing list message 
up or down by signing it with your key and forwarding it to an email 
address like praise@ or curse@, depending on your personal opinion. 
That will provide a low-threshold way for the "silent minority" to 
express their opinion about a particular message without getting into 
a yet another flame war, and provide a feedback loop for the authors, 
informing them of other's opinions about their posts.

Now, I know that for a bunch of geeks like us it is very tempting to 
start discussing the technical details and how the scoring is  
going to be implemented, and how the results are going to be used, 
and so on. The way I would like to see this idea developing is that it 
starts as an unofficial project, with very simple rules (like, "you 
can vote once for each message ID"), which simply collects the data 
and makes it publicly available in some way. Interested parties and 
individuals can then use the data to provide their own metrics (and 
try to convince others that their way of calculating the mailing list 
"karma" is the right one). Eventually, we should be able to settle on 
one authoritative way of calculating it, which can become "official", 
and used to develop procedures for warning the offensive posters that 
their behaviour is considered disruptive, for example.

I believe that at this point Nick Rusnov, John Goerzen and myself have 
expressed interest in working on the first stage of the project. If 
you have any ideas or comments - please share, we would also welcome 
your contribution if you decide to help out with it.

Cheers.
-- 
Jurij Smakov   ju...@wooyd.org
Key: http://www.wooyd.org/pgpkey/  KeyID: C99E03CC


signature.asc
Description: Digital signature