Puppy Website: Looks, Bugs, Wishlists

[HairyWill]

As far as IPR goes. I think that everyone owns copyright of their own blog posts and comments. This however doesn't mean that anyone has the right to expect them to be published now or in the future. This leads to the conclusion that anyone with sufficient privileges can delete anything they want (this is likely to cause disagreement some time...soon?)

Obvious spam (sex, drug, mobile phones) seem fairly easy to deal with. Delete it and suspend the users account, any admin can do this. Do they deserve an explanation?

There have been a number of blog posts that I find incomprehensible and one that I thought might be building to a scam. Providing that the volume of them isn't swamping the others I don't see this as a problem.

I think that all content on the site should be on-topic, my perspective is that the site provides a public face. I'm not sure how we should deal with on topic posts that are selling goods and services. eg
for a good puppy compatible laptop go here (I do/don't own this)
to buy custom puppy T shirts go here (I do/don't own this)
to pay me to create you a custom puppy go here
to pay me for puppy technical support go here
These all seem fairly reasonable to me. Whilst it is hard to check how is the beneficiary of, buy a secondhand laptop here, I think it reasonable to ask the poster to identify who gets the cash. What about , "buy compact flash IDE adapters here"

There have been outbreaks of fighting on the forum that do nothing to enhance the communities reputation. Any disagreement should be courteous, reasoned and IMHO conducted off channel.

I think we need to establish some back channel communication method for all the admins and editors to resolve individual problems. I agree that anyone that wants to should have editor status (anyone can PM me with their account name). A finite list (however big) makes it much easier to demonstrate a consensus. I'm not sure how easy it would be to add a restricted content area for this or possibly just use a mailing list.

Currently any authenticated user can submit a News Item, to maintain the quality of the news I believe this should be restricted to editors, translators and admins. If any external site was to carry a feed I think this one is a prime candidate.

I notice also that often a puplet announcement has been duplicated as a news or blog post. This seems pointless, the separate areas exist so that site subscribers can choose the type of information they receive. If I want to know about puplet releases I will subscribe to that feed, having to sift through them in another feed is noise.

Some puplets release beta versions, should the puplets feed be used for this? Do we care? Should beta release entries be replaced by the final or should they be deleted when the final is released.

I would like to see more fields in the puplet template such as creator name, support url. What would be really fancy would be to have an open metadata list where any number of key:value pairs could be entered. Ideally this would offer suggestions for existing keys and values (this is beyond my current ability)

This format for puplets would also work for creating a software repository index if there was a new node type, software.

[WhoDo]

As far as IPR goes. I think that everyone owns copyright of their own blog posts and comments. This however doesn't mean that anyone has the right to expect them to be published now or in the future. This leads to the conclusion that anyone with sufficient privileges can delete anything they want (this is likely to cause disagreement some time...soon?)

Obvious spam (sex, drug, mobile phones) seem fairly easy to deal with. Delete it and suspend the users account, any admin can do this. Do they deserve an explanation?

One of the things that causes me some personal concern is the thought that I might be providing a platform for some nefarious activity or other, as the hosting owner of record. I believe we have a clear obligation to ensure what we do causes no harm to the puppy community or anyone else.

In that light, I have no problem with any admin deleting off-topic spam or anything else suspicious without explanation. I consider that an obligation to the community.

There have been a number of blog posts that I find incomprehensible and one that I thought might be building to a scam. Providing that the volume of them isn't swamping the others I don't see this as a problem.

If in doubt, ask the poster to show cause why their blog privileges should not be removed. Yes, it is a "privilege" in the context that someone else pays the bills and suffers any fallout from their activities. I do not want to risk my home or my livelihood supporting "free speech", simply because mine is the only name on the hosting agreement. I hope it will be replaced by a community entity some day, but for now this comes under the heading of an obligation to me as the hosting donor.

I think that all content on the site should be on-topic, my perspective is that the site provides a public face. I'm not sure how we should deal with on topic posts that are selling goods and services. eg
for a good puppy compatible laptop go here (I do/don't own this)
to buy custom puppy T shirts go here (I do/don't own this)
to pay me to create you a custom puppy go here
to pay me for puppy technical support go here
These all seem fairly reasonable to me. Whilst it is hard to check how is the beneficiary of, buy a secondhand laptop here, I think it reasonable to ask the poster to identify who gets the cash. What about , "buy compact flash IDE adapters here"

Agreed. Maybe we can take care of the issues here with a Disclaimer Notice on the main page about "All care but no responsibility" for goods and services offered through blog postings?

There have been outbreaks of fighting on the forum that do nothing to enhance the communities reputation. Any disagreement should be courteous, reasoned and IMHO conducted off channel.

I think we need to establish some back channel communication method for all the admins and editors to resolve individual problems. I agree that anyone that wants to should have editor status (anyone can PM me with their account name). A finite list (however big) makes it much easier to demonstrate a consensus. I'm not sure how easy it would be to add a restricted content area for this or possibly just use a mailing list.

Agreed, again "within reason". Clearly we wouldn't want "nefarious spam poster" to have editor status, would we? I am happy for the admins to make these decisions so long as they are ready and willing to defend them if the proverbial doo-doo hits the fan.

Currently any authenticated user can submit a News Item, to maintain the quality of the news I believe this should be restricted to editors, translators and admins. If any external site was to carry a feed I think this one is a prime candidate.

Absolutely agree! News is the public face of the community and we need to protect that from rotten eggs hurled by complete strangers.

I notice also that often a puplet announcement has been duplicated as a news or blog post. This seems pointless, the separate areas exist so that site subscribers can choose the type of information they receive. If I want to know about puplet releases I will subscribe to that feed, having to sift through them in another feed is noise.

I have no problem with "Final" versions being briefly announced in News, but all other announcements belong in their own feed. Perhaps the News announcements could/should be aggregated to a weekly mention a la Distrowatch's weekly news posting of new releases announced with links to the appropriate feed location?

Some puplets release beta versions, should the puplets feed be used for this? Do we care? Should beta release entries be replaced by the final or should they be deleted when the final is released.

Testers have to be found somewhere, somehow. Such announcements become a service to at least a part of the community IMHO. That said, new announcements should replace old ones and the old announcement deleted.

I would like to see more fields in the puplet template such as creator name, support url.

This also comes under the heading of "obligation" to the community. There MUST be a minimal amount of information provided to allow people to decide whether the puplet is worth their time and effort - was it created properly, will it be well supported, is it sufficiently unique derivative, is it based on another puplet or the official release, etc. The template is the correct place to ensure that is the case.

[HairyWill]

One of the things that causes me some personal concern is the thought that I might be providing a platform for some nefarious activity or other, as the hosting owner of record. I believe we have a clear obligation to ensure what we do causes no harm to the puppy community or anyone else.

agreed

In that light, I have no problem with any admin deleting off-topic spam or anything else suspicious without explanation. I consider that an obligation to the community.

sounds fine, shoot first ask questions later, we have infinite lives

If in doubt, ask the poster to show cause why their blog privileges should not be removed. Yes, it is a "privilege" in the context that someone else pays the bills and suffers any fallout from their activities. I do not want to risk my home or my livelihood supporting "free speech", simply because mine is the only name on the hosting agreement. I hope it will be replaced by a community entity some day, but for now this comes under the heading of an obligation to me as the hosting donor.

fine

Agreed. Maybe we can take care of the issues here with a Disclaimer Notice on the main page about "All care but no responsibility" for goods and services offered through blog postings?

yup, the current, "Do not be naughty", needs expanding. It might also be good to show some guidelines on the pages that create nodes.

Agreed, again "within reason". Clearly we wouldn't want "nefarious spam poster" to have editor status, would we? I am happy for the admins to make these decisions so long as they are ready and willing to defend them if the proverbial doo-doo hits the fan.

being reasonable is always a good rule

Absolutely agree! News is the public face of the community and we need to protect that from rotten eggs hurled by complete strangers.

Done. I have disabled "creation" and also "edit own node" permission for authenticated user for node types LatestNews

I have no problem with "Final" versions being briefly announced in News, but all other announcements belong in their own feed. Perhaps the News announcements could/should be aggregated to a weekly mention a la Distrowatch's weekly news posting of new releases announced with links to the appropriate feed location?

I think a weekly roundup news item would be good. Maybe a different editor could do it every week to give it a different flavour. This could include references to new, puplets, and notable blog entries including Barry's.

Testers have to be found somewhere, somehow. Such announcements become a service to at least a part of the community IMHO. That said, new announcements should replace old ones and the old announcement deleted.

I'm not sure, I could be swung either way. The forum might be a better place to do this, I suspect that all those able to provide helpful beta testing feedback check there anyway. Alternatively it could work for puplet developers to blog about developments and then only make a puplet announcement when the release was fixed.

This also comes under the heading of "obligation" to the community. There MUST be a minimal amount of information provided to allow people to decide whether the puplet is worth their time and effort - was it created properly, will it be well supported, is it sufficiently unique derivative, is it based on another puplet or the official release, etc. The template is the correct place to ensure that is the case.

Do you agree with support url and creator, can you think of any others? This will need Tom to modify the database structure.

[oblivious]

can you think of any others?

I made some suggestions in a post on the first page of this thread

[Aitch]

Aitch wrote:
Is there to be a 'Your spam will be removed/reported' rule, a la forum?

I would certainly hope so, but it would have to be the community's decision.

I've already given my views on Spam, here;

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=29542

I'm in favour of prosecution, or at the very least getting their ISP to rescind their web access, which is being done more regularly now, by reporting to this and other sites like e.g. castlecops

I sent John Murga a link for adding a spambot filter to the forum about a week ago but haven't had a reply yet, though the problem we get are stupid & annoying human spammers who leave email addresses
I also suggested a spampost where all spam postings could be added & to then have each forum member take a visit & send each spammer the other spammers email addresses, just to keep THEM busy
100 spammers spamming each other would be only funny, but it would still clog the web!!

HairyWill wrote:
There have been a number of blog posts that I find incomprehensible and one that I thought might be building to a scam. Providing that the volume of them isn't swamping the others I don't see this as a problem.

If in doubt, ask the poster to show cause why their blog privileges should not be removed. Yes, it is a "privilege" in the context that someone else pays the bills and suffers any fallout from their activities. I do not want to risk my home or my livelihood supporting "free speech", simply because mine is the only name on the hosting agreement. I hope it will be replaced by a community entity some day, but for now this comes under the heading of an obligation to me as the hosting donor.

I think this is the same position John Murga is in, and I think it is testament to his admin role that the forum is as is, very good, IMHO
Overall, I think it reflects on BarryK too, so I think we as a community have to try to keep within the spirit of Puppy's creator, or he could simply say, "I'm off" & move on to other things
I'd like to see some sort of headline notice re: IPR, though, as I agree, it's a priveledge, and should, IMHO remain so, even if the community take on WhoDo's legal liability, there would have to be a legal representative body AFAIK
Wasn't this what the foundation was for? Can it be used for this?
Anyhow, I just think there should be some notice to the effect that, 'there is no right of publication implied on this website, and postings are liable to change/removal without notice'
Are we going to utilise creative commons licensing for the site re copyright? Have these matters been discussed?

I think that all content on the site should be on-topic, my perspective is that the site provides a public face. I'm not sure how we should deal with on topic posts that are selling goods and services. eg
for a good puppy compatible laptop go here (I do/don't own this)
to buy custom puppy T shirts go here (I do/don't own this)
to pay me to create you a custom puppy go here
to pay me for puppy technical support go here
These all seem fairly reasonable to me. Whilst it is hard to check how is the beneficiary of, buy a secondhand laptop here, I think it reasonable to ask the poster to identify who gets the cash. What about , "buy compact flash IDE adapters here"

My take on selling is that there shouldn't be ANY 'sell x here' links at all, period
If forum members 'want to let people know that they are in business & offer such & such service or have items to sell PM me for more' I think is cool
It should IMHO be subtle, & "demand led rather than promo fed"
However links within context of news, e.g OLPC/relevant hardware is OK

I would like to see more fields in the puplet template such as creator name, support url.

I would suggest that could also be a way of preventing there being too many personal pups rather than practical & needed variations on a theme
Again this raises the question of where the line gets drawn

Aitch

[LOF]

First off, I think this discussion is very important. I also think action now will be best before the site grows too big.

OK my position on this is as follows:

Admin back-channel is required. Myself and Tom have been emailing back and forth in what is probably not the most efficient way of communicating. Restricted access forum, chat or suchlike? - but would need to be within the site

In line with this, I feel justification for removal of spam/etc need only be with the admin team after removal, a spammer doesn't need to be told he's been removed. This would allow for a discussion between admins to happen in the case of "crossing the line".

Which leads me onto my next point... guidelines, however boring and ignored, need to be somewhere so that we can justify any decision made. We can't have "well you didn't block him, but you did block me for the same thing", it has to be written in stone. This would also protect us legally.

As to puplet submissions I'd say any release that happens more than say 3 weeks apart could be added as a seperate event. Final versions should always be made in new entries. Various stages of beta releases could be the same entry just updated.

Bare in mind this is all just my humble two cents.

[Aitch]

In line with this, I feel justification for removal of spam/etc need only be with the admin team after removal, a spammer doesn't need to be told he's been removed. This would allow for a discussion between admins to happen in the case of "crossing the line".

This reminds me, I intended to suggest a 'move to this pot' possibilty as an alternate to deletion for dubious postings, then if there's a follow up legal challenge, or similar, there's a copy available with hopefully the admin's comment/reason for 'dropping it in the pot'

Do we have a legal team/advisor? for the unforeseen et al?

Aitch

[LOF]

This reminds me, I intended to suggest a 'move to this pot' possibilty as an alternate to deletion for dubious postings, then if there's a follow up legal challenge, or similar, there's a copy available with hopefully the admin's comment/reason for 'dropping it in the pot'

Good idea. We can't just have admins deleting things that are never seen again, otherwise no-one else would know that what had been and gone.

Again this probably would work best in the form of an admin back channel.

Also a different point, is there a way we can edit the pages like the Add Puplet page (http://www.puppylinux.org/node/add/puplet) so that we can add a few guidelines at the top? That way any restrictions that we enforce wouldn't need to be in huge letters on the main Puplets page that everyone goes to. Just a thought, might not be do-able.

[HairyWill]

I've added some text to the top of the add puplet page. I think this needs admin access, let me know if you think it needs modifying in anyway.

Looking closely it seems much more straightforward to extra fields than I thought just by using the drupal control panel. It is also possible to have fields that are built from drop down lists, this might be good for "base puppy version".

I had a look at the "publishing options" that are visible at the bottom when you edit a page. I was hoping that unchecking "published" would stop the page being visible, I think that editors can do this, but it doesn't seem to work. There is a create revision option, so possibly for a page that an editor was unsure about they could create a revision, replace the content with an explanation and then seek guidance. Though instant deletion of obvious spam is best.

[Aitch]

and I've added a rider to the welcome page - jump in,
referring 'I need help' type posters, to not add any more comments, & to freely register on the forum for tech support
I also added thx to JM for hosting it

Whilst were on this learning curve with drupal, would it be a good idea for a seperate drupal tips/tweaks thread?

Will, you seem fairly au fait with it, do you think 'too many cooks' may apply if we don't keep a tally of changes?

Aitch

[HairyWill]

Whilst were on this learning curve with drupal, would it be a good idea for a seperate drupal tips/tweaks thread?

Will, you seem fairly au fait with it, do you think 'too many cooks' may apply if we don't keep a tally of changes?

In reality I think most of the cooks are out the back having a ciggie, though I agree it would be good to keep a record of changes.

As far as content goes then the revisions system should be able to record changes though currently I think that this is turned off by default for everything except wiki pages. It would also be possible to enable the diff module for content types other than wiki nodes as well. I'm not sure how much this might cost CPU/storage.

I'm not au fait with it at all, I'm just gung ho and not scared of breaking things. Having an admin changelog might be good. Site configuration has slowed down and this would make it easier to back out of any changes that cause a problem. Should this be a wiki page?

I think we should start deleting comments that are more than a couple of weeks old that are no longer relevant. I'm looking at the wiki main page and there is no obvious mechanism to delete comments.

[tombh]

I've been away for a bit, so excuse me if I've forgotten to respond to any of the points raised.

Firstly I think the idea of some rules 'written in stone' is a must for the reasons already discussed. So next step is a draft version, anybody willing?

I entirely agree with the opinions expressed and changes made regarding the Latest News, RSS feeds and permissions. I'm also glad that that the recent spam and screenshot shenanigans was easily dealt with. Just to be clear, ever since a captcha form was placed on the registration page a few weeks ago, bots can no longer register with the site and automatically post spam. However, this means there was a period when the captcha wasn't in place so it may be a possibility that there are some bots registered on the site.

I think blatant spammers should be banned by both username and IP address. Until we know what we're doing don't forget that it'd be good to record the IP and username of the guilty spammer before the spam is removed and the details are lost.

A quick browse through Drupal's huge selection of modules came up with the Flag module. Don't forget to have a look at Drupal's modules when your thinking about solving new problems, there's almost always someone whose already come up with a solution. It'd be best if each piece of content, even comments, just had a one-click "quarantine this" button underneath it that editors and above could access. There doesn't seem to be a module that provides exactly this functionality, though I haven't looked very hard yet, and I can always hack the flag module if needs be.

On the subject of Drupal, I've added some links on the Website Help page; some good guides and introductions to developing. I love Drupal and am very happy to help anybody interested in learning more about it.

[tombh]

I'd done a silly thing to his paw,
Because toes he had less then the four!
But as of today,
We can happily say,
That this isn't the case any more

(You might have to hit refresh a few times though to see the change)

[HairyWill]

nice

(You might have to hit refresh a few times though to see the change)

that doesn't rhyme

[oblivious]

That this isn't the case any more

Yay!

[WhoDo]

I'd done a silly thing to his paw,
Because toes he had less then the four!
But as of today,
We can happily say,
That this isn't the case any more

raffy will be very pleased.

[Aitch]

@tombh

excellent!!

Aitch

[raffy]

But as of today,
We can happily say,

Count his paws and it's four!

There must be a poem and song section somewhere. I knew Pizzasgood has done quite a lot of stanzas already.

Headfound's could be the featured video/song at the top of that page.

[Aitch]

Just what we need raffy: -

Headline: A 'bad poetry to music' page
subtitle: 'Think yours is worse?'

tongue firmly in cheek of course,

we could have fun with it, you know what open invites to poets/musos brings up, I'm sure?

Absolute hilarity, if the energy goes well!

anyone got a gif, I haven't got a tongue in cheek?

We can always maintain 'editorial prerogative'

No offence to headfound if his song goes at the top, though

what say you?

Aitch

[raffy]

Perfect - Aitch can hunt down those stanzas in the forum. Here's an example:

Sanity Implodes by Pizzasgood
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=22336

And Aitch, don't miss the caption in Headfound's "Puppy Linux Song":
"advert for Puppy Linux, with superb singing!!"