response 125 of 170:

Jan 10 19:34 UTC 2004

Ah, I understood Dan to have said that I said that that kind of behavior
made community impossible.  Which isn't true.  M-Net has a perfectly
good community, that is much enjoyed by many people.  There are limits
on what can be posted in such a community, as there are in any kind of
community.   Personally I'd rather be where community standards place
limits on how nasty you can be, then where community standards place
limits on how openly you can talk about your own life.  But a lot of
people seem to think the former is a horrid infringement on free speech,
while the latter is perfectly fine and only sensible.

response 129 of 170:

Jan 11 03:46 UTC 2004

Regarding #125; Yeah, my bad; I think I misinterpreted the point you were
trying to make.

response 131 of 170:

Jan 11 09:26 UTC 2004

Rowena!

response 133 of 170:

Jan 11 17:26 UTC 2004

I tend to see this a several distinct but related issues:

(1) The stuff that was posted on M-Net.  I've said I thought it was
    remarkably thoughtless, and that I've lost some respect for some
    of the people who did that.  Nobody has ever called for it to be
    censored, or for the people involved to be punished.  Valerie's
    reaction to it is only relevant at all as a measure of it's
    impact.  I can see where you might disapprove of Valerie's response,
    but if her response was bad, that doesn't retroactively make the
    M-Net posts OK.

(2) Valerie's deletion of her baby diary items from Grex.  You can
    evaluate this on several levels.  Was it an over-reaction?  Was it
    legal within Grex rules?  Did she know it was illegal within Grex
    rules.  My opinion is no, no, and no, but I can see where others
    may disagree, especially on the first one.

(3) Grex's response to Valerie's deletion of her baby diary items.
    Valerie didn't leave staff because of the M-Net thing, or out of
    horrible guilt for deleting her item.  She had mostly just lost
    patience with the being routinely raked over the coals in coop.
    Valerie was the single most active staff member, mostly policing
    vandals and disk hogs.  She had to make a lot of judgement calls,
    and periodically everyone would have a big debate in coop to see
    if Valerie was the latest reincarnation of Hitler or not.  The
    last case was the jp2 mail spam thing, I think.  Other staffers
    who actually do things get hit with the same thing.  That kind of
    staff work isn't fun and being routinely beat up about it isn't
    fun either.  She'd been approaching her limit for a long time, and
    this happens to be the point where she crossed it.  I don't think
    we need to discuss whether Valerie was justified in leaving staff.
    The wonder is that she stuck it out so long after her involvement
    in the Grex community had been so much reduced.

(4) The deletion of all of Valerie's postings.  This is actually the
    one that some people seem to hold most strongly against her,
    calling her a vandal.  However, this is the one action where
    Valerie was 100% within her rights according to Grex rules.  If
    this is all that offensive to you, then maybe Grex's rules need
    to be revisited.

(5) The deletion of JEP's item.  This is the one instance where
    Valerie knowingly violated Grex rules and acted outside of her
    authority as a Grex staffer.  Also of all the things deleted it
    is the one where the case for deletion was the most compelling.

(6) The restoration of JEP's item.  This is among the things most
    useful to discuss the merits of, as this a question we need to
    find a resolution to soon.  I don't believe that the question of
    whether or not it should be restored should depend heavily on
    how you feel about (5).  It would make no sense to punish JEP
    for Valerie's actions.

(7) The restoration of the Baby Diary items.  This is essentially
    an identical question to (6), except that if you are feeling a
    compelling desire to punish Valerie, this is the one you can do it
    on.

Then there are a bunch of less specific questions.  What should grex's
deletion policy be.  How should Grex be interacting with its staff?  Is
it appropriate to use member proposals to address specific cases?

I think that if you try to address all these questions as a single
question, mixing arguments on one topic with arguments on another topic,
then you get a huge unresolvable mess.  If you separate them out, then
you get some questions that we can resolve, and some questions that we
don't urgently have to resolve (which doesn't mean that they aren't
worthy of discussion).
    

response 135 of 170:

Jan 12 11:30 UTC 2004

Re #133, point (4):  Nah, no need to revisit the rules.  But I'll point
out that being within one's right to do a certain thing does not make
it a good idea to do that thing, or make it wrong for people to be
annoyed that the thing was done.

response 139 of 170:

Jan 13 22:34 UTC 2004

As I've been one of the most vocal using the word vandal in reference to
Valerie, I can say at least that I'm not calling her a vandal for
deleting all her own postings.  I think it was stupid and petulant
behavior, but not vandalism.  
  Deleting everyone else's posts in the baby diary and in jep's items
was vandalism.  Restoring those posts in those items is not about
punishing anyone, it's about repairing the damage that a vandal has done
to the system.  

I just think it's a really, really awfully bad idea for Grex to put up
with anyone deleting other people's comments, no matter who they are or
how compelling the reason.  If we allow it in general, we're setting
ourselves up for years of having to make decisions about the validity of
other people's reasons for wanting items deleted.  If we disallow it in
general but allow it in these particular cases, we're saying that
valerie and jep are somehow more important and their reasons for
censoring people are more important than anyone else's could possibly be.  

Suppose next year polytarp logs in and says that he is going to be
conducting job interviews, and he wants all the items in which he acted
like an asshole deleted because he has changed and they could
potentially hurt him if a prospective employer got ahold of them.  Are
we going to have this whole discussion again?  Or are we just going to
tell him to delete his own posts and go away?  Why is polytarp different
from valerie and jep?  

I don't buy the water-under-the-bridge argument.  This *isn't* in the
past; we have backups which are (presumably; maybe valerie owns a
magnet) still intact and so nothing is final.  If we do not restore
these items from them, we are collectively just as culpable for this
censorship as valerie.  

response 141 of 170:

Jan 14 14:29 UTC 2004

I like the polytarp analogy.

response 143 of 170:

Jan 14 16:34 UTC 2004

jep, you are simply RATIONALIZING!!!!!  It's really quite annoying - stop it.
"They're something else now."  BS.  They are what they are, threads of text.
To me, the jury is still out on whether any of the items deleted by valerie
should be restored.  But I will not accept your argument that they have
magically morphed into something more than they were.  Your statements are
self-serving, and I'm tired of hearing it.

response 145 of 170:

Jan 14 19:56 UTC 2004

Re #142:  I've avoided using the "vandalism" word before this, but I
          need to use it here to make a distinction.  Those items were
          not deleted by someone with the authority to do it as part of
          normal Grex practice.  Asking whether we would call for their
          return if a FW had cleaned them out is a poor analogy for that
          reason.

          A better analogy is whether we'd ask for them to come back if
          they'd been removed by a vandal who wasn't a trusted member
          of the staff at the time.  Say polytarp had done it.  Would
          we want them back?  Absolutely.

response 147 of 170:

Jan 14 23:52 UTC 2004

yer just that special.

response 149 of 170:

Jan 15 02:00 UTC 2004

Re resp:143: Everyone is rationalizing in this item.  Specifically, 
they're presenting what they feel are the rational reasons for their 
opinions.

I disagree with the 'vandalism' analogies.  I don't feel they're 
accurate.  If someone hacked root and started deleting stuff, they'd be 
clearly doing something that was against the rules.  It looks to me like 
what valerie and jep did was in a grey area.  Not even all the remaining 
staff initially agreed on whether what valerie did was permissable or 
not.  I'm not sure it's fair to retroactively apply a black-and-white 
policy to their actions *now*.