response 60 of 79:

Jun 8 19:43 UTC 2000

In truth, the only reason that we're having all these debates is because it
would be *easy*, requiring no programming, to make scribble really scribble.
If there were no scribble command to begin with, I seriously doubt if this
whole "I want to be able to delete my responses" debate would have come up.
For the same reason, there is no "easy", non-programming-change way to
implement item editing, at least in picospan.  So that makes it an issue
"at the next level" compared to scribble scribbling.

response 62 of 79:

Jun 8 20:10 UTC 2000

See, Jan, I guess that's where we disagree.  I don't see this change as
solving a lot of problems.  And I do see it as a significant shift in how
we approach conferencing.  In instituting a policy where we give posters
perpetual controlling ownership over anything and everything they choose
to enter in the conferences we'd better be prepared to be consistent in
respecting those rights.  We are calling them "rights", right?  So I
really don't think staff would have any choice if asked by a poster to
edit his captured comments.  Staff has the ability to remove the comments,
the author has asked it be done, and staff has not allowed the author the
tools to do it himself.  Staff should edit the response if the re-poster
refuses to do so.  

Moving from deleting and re-entering a response to simply editing a
response is such a tiny jump that I can't see any issue with giving the
user the tools to do so.  Either way the conferencing get kind of messy, but
this allows the user the most control over his or her content. 

Is this the item where Eric is asking folks to summarize their point of
view?  I hope so, 'cause here it comes. 

We have allowed a problem to fester because we haven't been very clear
about how the scribble and expurgate commands work.  So fix that.  Disable
scribble and put a clear warning on expurgate that it only hides responses
from casual view. 

Don't go the way of extending perpetual editing rights.  Instead clearly
let everyone know, up front, before their very first entry, that anything
posted here is their intellectual property but that editing or deleting it
after publication is not an option. This policy will keep the poets happy
as their work doesn't now belong to Grex and it can't be ripped off and
made part of a million-seller anthology without the author's permission. 
I find it hard to believe any copyright law would hold Grex liable when
the author initially *agreed* to publish knowing self-censorship wasn't
allowed. 

Such a policy will also go a long way toward keeping the conferences
coherent, over time.

But here's the most significant by-product of such a policy - it will
encourage folks to think before posting. That's a really biggie.  There
will still be some really stupid things said from time to time but instead
of trying to hide it and pretend no damage was done it will result in all
involved having the opportunity to respond and maybe, just maybe, a
sincere apology, and a lesson learned all around.  How mature can you be.

But *whatever* policy we end up going with it should be very clearly
stated and consistently implemented.  Good luck, staff. 

response 64 of 79:

Jun 9 01:13 UTC 2000

I think I can summarize my position on all this now.

First of all, I think all this talk about legalisms has ignored the fact
that the legal system is a very crude way of dealing with the kind of
problems we have been discussing.  It would be much, much better for all
involved if we could solve potential issues without resorting to that.

Which is a good reason not to have a hard and fast policy that ties the
staff's hands.  Making lots of rules about just how sacred text is is a
recipe for backing ourselves into a corner, I think.  The alternative is to
trust the staff to act reasonably when faced with an unusual situation.  I
think that's the best way to keep Grex the kind of place where I want to
be, so I support keeping the rules flexible.

I started off agreeing with Mary, et. al. that the current system is fine
the way it is, with the possible exception that expurgate and scribble
could be better documented.  I've come around as far as thinking that it
would be fine with me if /bbs/censored's permissions were set so that only
staff members could read it.  Personally, I think that by scribbling
something, the author has already demonstrated that he retracts the
statement, and it doesn't matter whether it's actually readable or not
anymore.  But if it makes people more comfortable for it to be unreadable,
I guess that's OK with me. 

I really have to draw the line at being able to edit old responses, though.
To me that is worse than censorship, it's revisionism.  Jan's examples of
how it could be abused are only the most crude; there are many subtler ways
in which it could be used to alter history.  And as pfv said several
times, anyone who wants to alter his past text has the easy option of
scribbling it and entering a new response.

Mary, I do think it's a big leap from allowing people to delete their
responses to allowing them to edit them.  I don't have to swallow Joe's
argument about users' "control over their text" whole in order to agree that
it would be acceptable to allow people to remove their responses.  I think
Grex displaying someone's responses is somewhere between allowing people to
listen to a conversation and publishing their words; any attempt to make it
fit either of those models exactly runs into problems.  So we need to
compromise between them.

I talked about "altering history" up there, and maybe that sounds pompous. 
Grex is not a record of great events, after all.  But it is a record of
sorts, and I do feel strongly that is history, in a way.  Imagine if, in
50 years, some Grexer is a famous person, and you were his biographer.
Wouldn't Grex be a great source, then, to see what kinds of things your
subject was thinking of in the year 2000, and what other people were
thinking as well? I think so. And I'd like to see us take its integrity
seriously.  (While not, of course, ignoring the needs and desires of its
users.) 

response 66 of 79:

Jun 9 11:27 UTC 2000

Summary:  I'd like to be able to delete a response, have that response
replaced by a notice that it had been deleted by me on such-and-such a date,
and have the deleted response stored in a file that was readable only by
staff.

I don't want the ability to edit a response. 

response 68 of 79:

Jun 10 04:08 UTC 2000

The way the Picospan file formats currently work, it isn't always
possible to report who scribble a response or at what time it was
scribbled.  Neither Backtalk nor Picospan attempt to do so, though if we
worked at it, we could probably report the date/login most of the time.

The login is mostly not that interesting anyway, since on Grex you can
safely assume that any scribbled response was scribbled by the author.

response 70 of 79:

Jun 10 14:49 UTC 2000

        Cfadm.. and I thought FW did as well?

response 72 of 79:

Jun 10 19:12 UTC 2000

        Good.. shows SOME sense, anyway.

response 74 of 79:

Jun 11 01:23 UTC 2000

I'm unaware of any policy on cfadm-level scribbling.  Outside of a few
freakish-but-generally-dull hypothetical situations, i can't see why
cfadm would scribble anything anyway.  

response 76 of 79:

Jun 12 14:29 UTC 2000

(I recall at least one occurrence of credit-card-# scribbling by cfadm.
At that time cfadm did post notice of it, in the next available response in
that item.  The scribble command was not used, I think.)

response 78 of 79:

Jun 12 16:26 UTC 2000

        Good Deal.. Fine.. Post it load and plain on the webpages, and in
        newuser, and in the motd, and at the start of every conf.


        Kiss any further bbs-use/growth goodbye.