Where is item 32?

24 responses total.

This response has been erased.

Last night there was an item here, Co-op #32, about the military.
I had responded to it.  It's now gone.  What happened?

It's moved to agora now, I think,

It must have been done by the author, since the fairwitness didn't even
realize there was an item about the military here.

It was done by the author.

The author normally can't delete an item that has been responded to, I 
believe.  So root power would have to be used.  Did you use root for 
personal editorial purposes?  

(Oh yeah, Mary's response was, ``Perhaps a link to summer?''  And she was
right, since I really meant to post it in Agora.  It seemed more efficient
just to move it entirely, though.)

Regarding #6; Are you seriously considering that personal editorial purposes?
Surely you jest.  Your response consisted only of a suggestion to link it to
agora.

Yes, I consider your use of root power to delete your text and someone's 
response a misuse of superuser access.  This item wasn't a security risk. 
At the very least you should have asked cmcgee about it as she's 
fairwitness and probably wouldn't have advised you to simply freeze the 
item. 

This is a sign we really need a clear understanding of when root should be 
tampering with items. 

Mary, let's not make this into a bigger issue than it needs to be.

Fair enough; I apologize to you and cmcgee for any distress it may have
caused, and promise to consult with others any time something like this may
happen in the future.  I certainly meant no harm; it just seemed  like good
house keeping.

Would you be willing to draft a proposal for root modifications to item text?
Perhaps such a thing already exists.

Ok, before this gets too hot and loud:

I would have agreed that the item didn't belong in Coop to start with,
that it should be removed, and the conversation started in Agora.  

I did see the item and Mary's response, now that I think about it.  I
would not have worried that removing the item and that one response was
 "tampering".  

Dan, were you here when Valerie used root powers to remove some items
that jep had started, along with everyone's responses?  If you were,
then you need a strong reminder that that is against community standards
here.

Ok, got a slip notice.  Mary, Cross and I can make this work.


If you weren't let me know, and I'll give as short a version as I can of
what happened, and what went wrong, and why people called it vandalism.

that was Mary, Cross, and I:  three people not just two

No, I remember that incident quite well, and I do see what everyone is talking
about; I checked that there had only been one reponse and it was a suggestion
to link the item, so I really didn't think it would be a big deal to remove
the old one.  Clearly, that was dumb on my part.  Hey, I screwed up; I really
am sorry.

ok

Apology accepted. 

There is probably a policy in effect somewhere which talks about when root 
can remove text others have entered.  But if there isn't, there should be.     
 But I'd suggest that anytime you invoke root in order to do something for 
cross, you stop and think why the casual user can't do the same thing  without
root power.

Yeah. Consider too, dan, that people here are *really* sensitive about 
anything that even might be considered an abuse of root power. So while 
I dont think moving that item caused any harm, it just is a 'best 
practice' not to use root for such things. 

Re #16, last sentence: That's good advice.

The relevant policy, passed by member vote, can be found here:
http://www.grex.org/grexdoc/archives/votes/vote17

Here's the pertinent wording.

         An item's author, the person who originally enters an item,
         may remove that item from the system, in its entirety,
         at any time before someone responds to it using a different
         login ID.  After another person has responded, an item may be
         removed only if it violates the general policies of grex or
         of the conference it was entered in, or if it clearly abets
         criminal activity.

An item author always has the power to retire and freeze and item.  I
think that's the best way to handle something like that.

All good points.  Thanks, John, for pointing to the policy....

This brings up a (technical) question, though; why *can't* users move their
items around?  It seems like it could be a good thing.  The MindVox BBS had
the ability to `fling' a post from one forum to another; at least, I think
that is what they called it.  The basic idea was that you would fling a
post, and a note would be inserted in the *old* location saying, ``this post
was moved to wherever_it_went by whoever_flung_it whenever_it_was_flung.''
The new location had the original data.

I think something like that would be pretty cool.  Mary's criterion for
determining whether to move something is a good one (``is this something I
can do as myself, not root?''), but the *next* question is to ask, ``well,
why *can't* the average user do this?''  At the high level, it seems like
s/he should be able to.

Of course, in our environment, we're limited on two fronts: technically, and
culturally.  On the technical side, we have the issue that Picospan just
cannot do it, and we can't change Picospan because we don't have the source
code to it.  :-(  There's not much we can do about that, I'm afraid.
However, I'm starting to think that we need to get serious about finding an
open source replacement for Picospan.  Either get Fronttalk up to speed, or
build something new.  Either way, it's a non-trivial investment.

On the cultural side, I don't think that people are opposed to moving things
around (as evidenced by this discussion), but they are opposed to stuff
getting lost (also evidenced by this discussion).  How do you prevent a
`fling' operation from being abused?  That's something I do not have the
answer to....

Anyway, thoughts on this?

Well Dan. One thing you could have done would have been to ask to have
the item linked to Agora. I think that once a person has done that, they
can ask the fw of the original conference to unlink it. Then they can
retire and freeze it in the original conference. 

Or, a person can simply cut and paste the item and the responses if
desired and create a new item in another conference. Then the original
item can be frozen and/or retired. 

Those essentially accomplish the same thing without abusing any power. 

Re #19:  I don't see the value.  Once an item has active discussion and
people are invested in it, I think it'd be bad policy to move it.  The
edge cases (such as accidentally entering an item in the wrong conference)
are pretty rare and can be adequately handled by existing mechanisms
(like retire and freeze), I think.

(#20 slipped in.)

Regarding #20; I did copy and paste it to agora, but I didn't copy Mary's
resposne.  :-(

Regarding #21; I don't know; apparently, it was used all the time on MindVox.
Some former MindVox users still lament the lack of functionality in other
BBS-style software, for instance current-generation web forums.

Of course, there are many avenues for malicious abuse; imagine a user who
decided they didn't like the comments in some item who then flung it to some
far-reaching part of the system in an effort to hide it.

I guess I agree with John, that I don't grasp why the ability to move an
item from one conference to another at will would be useful.  We could allow
user to link items themselves (without a fairwiness), I suppose, but that
might result in someone entering a boring item and then linking it to all
conferences.  <Yawn.>

The link/retire combination has always worked for me in the past.

Well, if the community doesn't want it, I guess there's no real point.

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