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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 393 responses total. |
willcome
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response 215 of 393:
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Jan 8 22:12 UTC 2004 |
It really wants to make me cry, and I'm no sissy.
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willcome
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response 216 of 393:
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Jan 8 22:18 UTC 2004 |
(I'm a Tough Texas New Yorker.)
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jep
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response 217 of 393:
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Jan 8 22:23 UTC 2004 |
Valerie's script removing all of her responses from Grex is having a
severe impact on the system. I think it's impacting system speed; the
system has been very slow all day today. It's also wreaking havoc on
the conferences. She discussed a lot of things over the years, in a
lot of places.
According to 'top', the bbs process run by popcorn right now is
occupying aruond 13-14% of the CPU. Hmm, the "bbs" process isn't
constant; it comes and goes.
Her perl script is occupying around 8% of the CPU.
I can't think of Valerie Mates as a vandal or a system abuser... but
her action is having a much greater negative impact on Grex than when
jp2 sent e-mails to a group of users in December.
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mary
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response 218 of 393:
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Jan 8 22:26 UTC 2004 |
So, are we ready yet to actually talk about what to do next?
I'm not sure, but I'll suggest this - one, we not jump into any
type of membership vote to change the way we've done business.
I propose posters still have the opportunity to permanently remove
any responses they've entered. But whole items, with responses
from other users, are not under the editorial control of the person
entering the item.
Two, some text be added, wherever it belongs, advising fairwitnesses
to be very very careful with the kill command and pointing them
toward this discussion or warning them that censorship tends to draw
a lot of fire. No hard rules. It wasn't the lack of hard rules
that precipitated this issue.
A new conference be setup that will be for blogs where it will be
completely upfront that the rules there are quite different. The FW
will, on request, kill entire blogs on the request of the person who
started one. If you enter responses there you do so with the full
knowlege, expectation even, that they could be censored or removed
at any time. The blog owner rules the item. The conference FW is
simply going to follow the blog owner's orders. The conference FW
is still strongly discouraged from removing items they feel are
inappropriate. The items belong to the posters in blog.
As to reinstalling items that have been deleted, I suggest we give
this some time, and allow everyone to cool off. See if in a less
volatile atmosphere some reasonable solution could be found. How
long? Don't know. We'll just have to see how this goes. In the
end they may just be better off left gone and we move on.
I really don't see any place for the Board to jump in with help
here. If folks disagree with that I'd be interested in hearing what
you'd like the board to do.
Valerie should be thanked for all she's done for Grex over the
years. She will be missed.
Anyhow, that's probably how I'd like to see this proceed at this
point. I'd be curious what others would want done. I'm speaking
here as Mary, the user, and not for any group.
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naftee
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response 219 of 393:
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Jan 8 22:49 UTC 2004 |
re 217 valerie, the system administrator and longtime programmer, has yet to
learn of the unix command !nice and the picospan command 'retire'.
She will be missed.
re 218 None of us are really "mad".
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cross
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response 220 of 393:
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Jan 8 22:56 UTC 2004 |
Regarding #218; That mostly sounds reasonable, but I'm personally opposed
to the idea of a `blog' conference. Such things already exist in other
places, and that's Not what grex is supposed to be about.
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jep
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response 221 of 393:
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Jan 8 23:00 UTC 2004 |
I think Mary just jumped in with an entirely reasonable response.
Except for the blog conference -- about which I am ambivalent just now -
- I agree with everything she said.
Actually, I have more comments for the blog conference, too, but
there's another item for that.
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mary
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response 222 of 393:
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Jan 8 23:10 UTC 2004 |
Would you be willing to give it a six months trial run, Dan, just to
see how it goes? I'd hate to think we can't try something new here
just because it's done elsewhere. We're talking one conference,
clearly labeled as different. It would also serve as a bit of an
experiment for those who might feel all of Grex should move in this
direction.
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cross
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response 223 of 393:
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Jan 8 23:15 UTC 2004 |
If done in an experimental manner, contained, and clearly delimited from
the rest of the conferences, I would have a hard time arguing with its
existence. I personally wouldn't use it, but it's hard to argue with
the idea of a forum in which people enter into it volunteerily knowing
ahead of time they may be censored. If someone wishes to submit to that
with their words, that's their decision.
That's a long winded way of saying no, I wouldn't object with the
qualifiers you mentioned. I'm tempted to say it would be better to
build a new conferencing system for things like that, but that'd be a
big undertaking.
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bhoward
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response 224 of 393:
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Jan 8 23:27 UTC 2004 |
Grex is about conferencing and to my mind, that includes being open to
experiments in alternative ways of using this media.
I'd like to see this blog conference experiment given a chance to run.
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jmsaul
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response 225 of 393:
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Jan 9 00:02 UTC 2004 |
Has naftee demanded the removal of this discussion yet?
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aruba
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response 226 of 393:
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Jan 9 00:46 UTC 2004 |
I agree with Mary's proposal.
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gelinas
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response 227 of 393:
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Jan 9 01:28 UTC 2004 |
Not that I've noticed, Joe.
I think "vandalism" is the wrong word to describe Valerie's actions.
I agree that the result is a huge whole in many discussions. But
"vandalism" implies a malicious intent to cause harm. I don't see that
in Valerie's actions. Harm has, and will, result, but I don't think that
was her intent.
Mary is right that we need to figure out where we go from here. I also
think that she is right that we are not ready to vote on a change to
the policy. However, I think she doesn't go far enough: I think we are
not ready to vote on any policy on this subject at all.
So no, I don't think we are ready to talk about where we go from here.
Too many of us are still reacting from emotion, not from thought.
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naftee
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response 228 of 393:
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Jan 9 02:17 UTC 2004 |
re 225 Why, was I supposed to?
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slynne
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response 229 of 393:
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Jan 9 02:58 UTC 2004 |
I totally agree with mary and gelinas too.
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jp2
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response 230 of 393:
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Jan 9 03:04 UTC 2004 |
This response has been erased.
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jmsaul
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response 231 of 393:
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Jan 9 03:15 UTC 2004 |
I would urge calm too. I don't think that the acts of one stressed-out
root should either establish a new policy or require policies to prevent a
repeat. (I'd suggest preserving the most recent set of backups in order
to maintain options, however.)
Re #228: If enough people were claiming that Valerie had set a precedent,
it's be worth doing. At this point, I think whoever the coop
FWs are would just tell you to piss off. That's the appropriate
response, so don't bother.
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jlamb
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response 232 of 393:
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Jan 9 03:28 UTC 2004 |
This response has been erased.
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naftee
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response 233 of 393:
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Jan 9 05:14 UTC 2004 |
re 231 She didn't claim to be stressed-out!
re 230 Kiss my ass, bucko. It's hairier than yours.
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janc
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response 234 of 393:
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Jan 9 06:27 UTC 2004 |
I don't plan to take a large role in this discussion. I'm obviously
very biased on aspects of it. And there is a fairly broad range of
censorship policies that we could have that would be OK with me.
Various points I think I should comment on:
- No defacto new policy has been established. All these actions were
taken by one staff member who is now off staff. I don't think any
other staff member would have done the same.
- When I heard that Jep had requested that his divorce item be
removed, I didn't know what to think. I felt his that his desire
to have them deleted deserved respect, but Grex had no policy in
place to by which this could be done. I felt that it was an issue
that needed to be discussed in public. However, if the issue
was raised for public discussion, I knew that two dozen people would
immediately download copies of Jep's item and post it everywhere
they could, making the whole discussion moot.
In an attempt to resolve this dilemma, I sent mail to all board and
staff members suggesting that Jep's items be *temporarily* deleted
before starting a public discussion on the issue. In this way the
full Grex community could evaluate the request on it's merit,
without the discussion becoming instantly moot the moment it was
begun.
Several staff/board members thought this was a sensible plan,
especially since these were not active items - if we didn't tell
people that they had been deleted, then probably nobody would
notice for months.
Other staff/board people rejected the idea of even a temporary
deletion very strongly.
Before the discussion of this issue got very far, Valerie deleted
the items, in full knowledge that the board had not agree to either
a permanent nor a temporary deletion. I had no idea that she was
even thinking about doing this until after it had been done. My
expectation was that I'd have to pursue an argument in baff email
in hopes of winning a consensus of board to agree to a temporary
deletion. My guess is that a majority could have been achieved on
that point, though it would have taken time.
So, while I thought Jep's item should be deleted at least for long
enough to allow general discussion (and, in my personal opinion,
forever), I was fairly confident that that could be achieved "within
the system".
- No, Valerie didn't ask me for the cfadm password. I don't know the
cfadm password. If I ever knew it, I forgot it long ago. I also
routinely forget the root password. In the past I solved this
problem by asking Valerie for it, since she used it much more
frequently than I did, and has a much better memory. I'll need to
find a different strategy in the future.
- Staff should probably have a staff meeting soon. Probably not at
my house this time.
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janc
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response 235 of 393:
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Jan 9 06:36 UTC 2004 |
Oh yeah, I'm completely opposed to any policy that says the item author
can always kill an item with responses from others in it.
That Valerie and Jep were the ones who started these items is pretty
much incidental. The thing that distinguishes those items is that they
were the effective leaders of the discussions and the primary subjects
of the discussion. The fact that they entered the original item is the
very least part of what made the items "theirs".
If we were to make a policy enabling such deletions (and I'm not at all
sure that I think we should), then it would have to be something more
complex - having some kind of board of review that would decide each
case on a case-by-case merit. I think it's an icky concept, but it's
about the only sane way it could be handled.
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jep
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response 236 of 393:
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Jan 9 11:55 UTC 2004 |
Once I requested that my items be deleted, they became a time bomb and
a source of greater anxiety for me. There must be 12-15 people on the
baff e-mail list. That's a lot of people for keeping a secret,
especially on a system which is as open as Grex. There are
discussions all over Grex as a result of Valerie's items being
deleted. How long until someone slipped and said "valerie and jep",
and people started thinking about what that means? How long until
someone made a moral decision that the items shouldn't be deleted, and
so they'd just go ahead and mention them and make it impossible to
ever delete them? How long until it occurred to someone to archive
all the controversial items, just in case -- and thought of my items?
I'm still hoping no one on that list made a copy for themself before
the items got deleted.
It seemed to me that, if it became known publicly what I had
requested, then those items could come back as an active discussion
again, with excerpts posted around, and who knows what all else. I
really didn't want that, obviously.
When I found out the baff discussion was taking place, I pressed for
the items to be deleted right away. It took two days to delete my
items as it was. I wasn't prepared to wait for two weeks or two
months. I appealed strongly to Valerie. I told her (and the rest of
the list) that it didn't take a discussion when she wanted her items
deleted; it shouldn't for me, either. That appeal, as it turned out,
worked. Under the highly unusual circumstances, I think she did what
she had to do.
I'm not sure how to set a policy on such deletions, either. It sure
seems to me my items were a good candidate for being deleted, and
worthy of an exception even if it's specifically against system
policy. Valerie felt her items merited an exception (or that she was
actually staying within system policy; I guess I'm unclear on what she
thought). The possibility now exists for other exceptions. I don't
think it's reasonable to say, "Okay on deleting valerie and jep's
items, but no other items can ever be deleted".
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naftee
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response 237 of 393:
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Jan 9 13:11 UTC 2004 |
jep: Did you try retiring them?
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gelinas
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response 238 of 393:
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Jan 9 13:59 UTC 2004 |
I think she thought she was within the limits when she deleted her items.
I think she thought she was beyond the limits when she deleted your items.
Recently, someone mentioned having copied the entirety of /bbs to their
local disk, for ease of off-line reading. Last night, in party, someone
said they were in the process of copying off the entirety of /bbs to
their local disk so that they, at least, would have a "complete" archive.
I don't know if copying /bbs will include retired items. However, it
is very clear to me that the genie is out of the bottle and is NOT going
back into it. Further deletions will serve no useful purpose.
I do not know exactly how many people are on the 'staff' list; only
seven are on the 'board' list, and at least one of them is also on the
'staff' list.
jep, I don't know that your follow-up plea went to the board. I know
that I tried at last three times to bounce it to the board, but I never
received a copy of those bounces. It was addressed to Valerie, with a
carbon-copy to the staff.
When staff first request, I asked for consensus because, although I thought
your items could and should be deleted, it was clear to me that others
disagreed. Staff should not act unilaterally. One staff member replied
almost immediately, in favour of deleting your items. Another replied
within eight hours (given the hour of my request, a reasonable delay),
opposing the deletion.
The community of grex is divided on this issue. The staff is divided
on this issue. The board is divided on this issue. No rapid decision
is possible.
The losses of the past week, both of text and people, are regrettable.
I think we are learning from them.
I am going to take the liberty of quoting from your plea:
"Additionally, I feel strongly that, since you [Valerie] were allowed to
delete your items, I should be allowed to have mine deleted."
She was not "allowed" to delete her items. No one who had read the
discussions from Monday to Wednesday, when your message was sent, could
reasonably conclude that she had any permission to act as she did. I think,
knowing the harm she had suffered, and recognising the very similar harm
you could suffer, she acted in the only way she ethically could.
Note well: I can consider her actions ethical, even though they are not
actions I, myself, would have taken. I also consider my *in*action in
this case ethical.
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jp2
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response 239 of 393:
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Jan 9 14:11 UTC 2004 |
This response has been erased.
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