response 60 of 133:

Oct 2 21:04 UTC 2007

Almost every forum in which I participate requires a form of validation 
before posting is allowed.  For most, it's a confirmation emailing, and 
turnaround access is pretty much instantaneous.  Anyone who wanted to 
cause problems would just need to be able to provide lots of valid email 
addresses.  But still, it seems to be enough to keep twits to a bare 
minimum.

I'd very much prefer we go that route and not get into wholesale 
censorship.  

Between asking for some type of validation-lite and encouraging users
to invoke the "forget" feature, we should be in reasonable shape, 
I'd think.  If not, we look at more aggressive measures.
But moderation and censorship should be considered the atom bomb of
fixes.  It would probably solve the problem and kill Grex at the 
same time. 

response 62 of 133:

Oct 2 22:16 UTC 2007

I am supportive of a new policy that would require Class Two privileges 
before a user could post in the conferences. The founder in me is saying 
"yuck" but I sense we've taken the totally open experience as far as we 
can.

As to the specifics - I'd suggest we start with the lightest possible 
touch, evaluate how it goes, then adjust as necessary.  Try validating 
using only a Grex email address and local (social) contact.  It may be 
enough of a barrier but key to this would be that a user would get a 
prompt response to their request for access.  The less automated the 
process the more I fear folks will end up moving on.  Having to wait 
would be a reallly bad thing here.

That is indeed the beauty of the kind of off-site email validation I run 
across almost everywhere else.  You give the system your gmail address 
(for example) and you immediately get an email response that requires 
you click to confirm you indeed requested access.  Click and tah-dah!  
You're in.  It's almost that fast. 

You could abuse this system, for sure.  But it would take some time.  
And a whole lot of email addresses.  

So, overall, I'd choose whatever system would make it the easiest for a 
potential new user to get in and posting and part of the community.

response 64 of 133:

Oct 2 23:22 UTC 2007

I think keesan makes a good point. It's like "destroying the village to save
it."

response 66 of 133:

Oct 3 02:54 UTC 2007

How would this stop our local vandals from opening new accounts and requesting
to post to the conferences?  

response 68 of 133:

Oct 4 12:34 UTC 2007

At the moment, the Board has not set specific guidelines for moving a
person into or out of Class 2.  At the last Board meeting, when the
group of Porters was created, the Board agreed that we were in new
territory.

At that time, the consensus was to allow the porters, as a sub-group of
staff, to develop criteria through the exercise of common sense.  As
staff they are expected to work together and come to consensus around
these issues, using current staff guidelines on blocking and banning as
a start.  

I've gathered a few TOS and Code of Conduct statements from other
conferencing sites and will be introducing various definitions from them
for coop discussion.  If we can agree on egregious examples of abuse,
then we will be able to discuss edge cases more clearly.  

response 70 of 133:

Oct 4 14:40 UTC 2007

I agree that that's what the threshold should be, and that this should
be made clear to the volunteers administering the class system.  It
would be very tempting to use the power to, say, disallow the kind of
postings we've been seeing from "jan" in Agora lately, and I don't think
it should be.

But I'm not sure I support lumping conference posting privileges
together with the other items in Class 2.  For one thing, I don't see
how it would prevent one type of posting abuse we had recently:  A
person creating a bunch of "stealth" accounts in advance, then using
them one at a time to flood conferences.  Such accounts would likely be
approved for Class 2 and could then be used for abuse at any point in
the future, before anyone had time to pull the plug on the account.

I've got some concern that the unpredictable delay involved with the
social validation process might lose us users who otherwise would make
positive contributions to the conversations here.  Discussion forums are
not exactly a scarce resource on the internet, so Grex has to compete
for people's time and attention; the Class 2 hurdle might cause folks to
lose interest and choose to go where the validation process is
guaranteed to be fast.  And unfortunately, we'd have no way of telling
whether social validation was having that effect or not.

So my problem is that I see the social validation process applied to
conference posting as having some potential (although hard to measure)
downsides without preventing abuse.  What would we gain by imposing it?

response 72 of 133:

Oct 4 18:18 UTC 2007

Let's get the discussion back to more of the proposals, not just one.  

slynne had six possibilities in Response 0.

1. Introduce a second set of conferences with a different set of rules 

2. Create a new default conference with moderation. Abusers could be
excluded. Users could be required to be validated before they can post.
[since this was before the existence of the class 2 validation, perhaps
she meant using the class 3 validation process.]

3. Create a new default conference with moderation. Any current users
could post but new users would be required to be validate before they
post. [again, I assume she meant class 3 validation process].

4. Create a new default conference with moderation. It could be open to
just paying users. [This is a subset of the class 3 user group.]
       
5. Allow item authors to moderate items. 

6. Make no procedural changes to conferences but use social pressure to
encourage thoughtful high quality posts. 

7. other proposed (Response 4) creating a new set of conferences that
allow the item's creator to moderate the posts in that item. 

8) cyclone proposed(Response 52 letting conference participants "vote"
on an item-by-item basis about keeping an item in a conference. 

9) I proposed (Response 51) making conference posting class 2 access.  

Is there consensus on 2 or 3 of these proposals being "better" or
"worse" than the others?

response 76 of 133:

Oct 4 22:21 UTC 2007

Since nobody knows what will work and what won't, I tend to favor an
approach that will allow flexibility and experimentation.

Discussion quality is a problem all over the public-access internet. 
Bloggers are constantly struggling with how permissive or restrictive to
be with allowing comments on their blogs, dealing with comment spam,
abusive users, etc.  Nobody has a perfect solution.  This is a hard
problem.  

I'll point out that Jan Wolter's blogging interface to Backtalk will
enable flexibility.

response 78 of 133:

Oct 5 09:42 UTC 2007

solve a social problem iwth a techinical solution? sound slike welfatre to me.

response 80 of 133:

Oct 5 13:19 UTC 2007

Or TS's misquided views of welfare, for that matter.

response 82 of 133:

Oct 6 02:27 UTC 2007

Would it help to ignore such postings instead of giving the poster lots of
attention?

response 84 of 133:

Oct 6 13:04 UTC 2007

I'm having a hard time with this proposal.  It's certainly not what we 
started out to do and it could throw up a gate that might keep interesting 
participants out. But the neighborhood has changed since 1991 and maybe 
it's time to put a lock on the door.  Or maybe it's more like a bell.

Sure, the forget command is useful, and we should encourage folks to make 
better use of it.  As is the twit filter for when forget gets tedious.  
But, it doesn't work when the twit sets out to flood the conference and 
make Grex unusable. And as infrequently as that happens, it happens, and 
when it does the system takes a big hit in terms of morale.  Our impotence 
at defending ourselves is insidious.

I usually trust in evidence based change.  But there aren't a lot of 
communities like Grex so comparison gets tricky.  But, in my experience, 
almost everywhere where public commentary is allowed, either validation 
and/or moderators are involved.  They tend to avoid being brought to 
their knees by vandals.  Is it safe to draw a connection?  Again, it's 
hard to tell for sure, but it may be worth trying the bell thing.

So we can stand firm and weather the storms or we can try making it a 
little less easy for vandals to have their way with us.  At this point I'd 
like to try putting up a few low speed-bumps, reversible speed-bumps, by 
slightly closing our open door.  I would not support censorship or 
moderators for Grex at this point.

We could start with an automated email validation system as is found 
almost everywhere else.  It asks the new poster to wait less than a minute 
to gain access, usually.  It does require the person have an off-Grex 
email account.  Level Two social validation would not be required here.  
One problem is this would require some staff coding to initiate.  I'm not 
sure that's doable at present.  But once in place it would give us a 
mechanism of disallowing a poster by email address instead of by IP 
address.  Sure, a determined vandal could persevere but he or she would 
have to use a fresh valid email address for each hit.  The speed-bump 
thing again.

Anyhow, my thoughts on what I'd like to see us try.