Re: [gentoo-project] Items for Council Agenda, May 14

[Raymond Jennings]

If I can throw my two cents in, I'd like to suggest, for the purposes of
whitelisting, that we consider the pros and cons of allowing a message from
X, where X is some individual.

The list of things X including, but not being limited to the following:

1.  A spambot
2.  An abusive commenter
3.  A completely new person with benign intentions
4.  A gentoo developer/staff member
5.  A gentoo user
6.  Anyone who has proven themselves benign through a history of non
abusive comments.
7.  Cases 3 through 6 where such sender's email account has been
compromised (presumably on a temporary basis) by a person of cases 1 or 2.

Preemptively blocking someone of case 3 or 5, for example, out of fear that
they may be cases 1 or 2, may be detrimental to Gentoo's openness.

I find it likely that there may be plenty of people in cases 3, 5, or 6,
who are not in case 4 and who it might cause harm to the project if they
were preemptively moderated.

In my very humble opinion, only cases 1 or 2 need dumped into the "ignore
all further postings" blacklist, and once an unknown new sender has been
vetted or proven themselves fit they should be provisionally whitelisted so
as not to burden the moderation team.

Finally I'd like to advise flexibility, both in terms of how decisions are
made and also when they are made.  Except in cases of blatant abuse or
spam, a person's helpful or harmful influence is a highly subjective
judgement that may even vary over time given the changing attitudes of the
person in question.



On Thu, May 11, 2017 at 1:02 AM, Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote:

> On czw, 2017-05-11 at 03:52 -0400, NP-Hardass wrote:
> > On 05/11/2017 03:17 AM, Matthias Maier wrote:
> > > Hello all,
> > >
> > > On Sat, Apr 29, 2017, at 12:00 CDT, "Anthony G. Basile" <
> blueness@g.o> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hi everyone,
> > > >
> > > > The Gentoo Council will be meeting in two weeks.  If anyone has any
> > > > issues we need to discuss, please let me know and I'll put it on the
> > > > agenda.  Thanks.
> > >
> > > I would like to make a last minute proposal.
> > >
> > > Proposal:
> > >
> > >   I ask the council to establish a procedure / team to moderate the
> > >   gentoo-project@ and gentoo-dev@ mailing lists:
> > >
> > >    - In general the amount of moderation shall as minimal as possible
> > >      (in particular developers and long-time contributors
> > >      unconditionally green-lighted),
> > >    - but for non-developers abusing the mailing lists for their own
> > >      agenda their contributions shall be moderated.
> > >    - Similar to irc operators there shall be a decicated moderator team
> > >      to ensure a quick and timely response.
> > >    - The moderator team shall be different from council members, and
> > >      ideally also comrel, such that these groups can act as a check and
> > >      balance.
> > >
> > > Rationale:
> > >
> > >   The gentoo-dev@ and gentoo-project@ mailing lists nowadays serve
> > >   an important role for Gentoo development (e.g. mandatory
> announcement,
> > >   RFCs, PATCH reviews). This function is currently severly impeded due
> > >   to the high level of noise and unrelated personal agenda [1].
> > >
> > > Best,
> > > Matthias
> > >
> > > [1] https://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/
> > >
> >
> > I'm going to second the proposal.
> >
> > As an aside, in considering this, I'd like a priori moderation
> > (whitelist+manual passthrough) to be weighed against a posteriori
> > moderation (automatic passthrough+reactionary blacklisting), assuming
> > that both are feasible with our ML system.
> >
>
> The difference between the two is that the former causes 'every non-dev
> is moderated, I guess that's fair' and the latter causes 'how dare you
> restrict my freedom of speech, you bastards, I'm the most important
> Gentoo developer since Daniel Robbins, you silly lives mean nothing
> compared to me, you wouldn't have been born if it was not for me...!'
>
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Michał Górny
>