Re: Shutting down the Off the Wall (was: Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items ...)

[Alec Warner]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2020 at 7:15 PM Andreas K. Hüttel <dilfridge@g.o>
wrote:

> > Please respond to this message with agenda items. Do not hesitate to
> > repeat your agenda item here with a pointer if you previously
> > suggested one (since the last meeting).
>
> I would like to propose the council consider shutting down the "Off the
> Wall"
> (OTW) forum on forums.gentoo.org permanently and without replacement.
>

FWIW my reply is very long but mostly comes down to what I feel is..lets
try to call it 3 principles.

(1) I strongly prefer folks to make a good faith effort to work with others.
(2) I want to make decisions based on shared goals and policies, not
people's personal preferences.
(3) I want to make decisions based on data. To that end I've tried to
provide some data to clarify some various points.

Also FYI: What about the polish OTW (
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewforum-f-61.html)


>
> Rationale:
>
> * provides zero value to the distribution
>

I think the OTW forum does provide value. Can you elaborate on why you
think the value is 0?

For example, forum-mods move offtopic threads from other forums into OTW,
so it serves as a holding bin for those conversations. We could advocate
moving those to the dustbin, but the dustbin is readonly, so threads may
come back.

In addition there are those who believe that the offtopic nature of OTW
keeps the rest of the forums a nicer cleaner place, and that suppressing
this content can have unintended consequences. So I request that you do
consider the 2nd and 3rd order consequences of this decision.

* large parts of the content are toxic and not something I (and others) wish
>   Gentoo to be associated with
>

The argument about it being toxic and you not liking it is...well...it's a
bad argument! All of a sudden you can just delete projects from Gentoo
because you "don't want to be associated with them because you think they
are toxic?" Isn't this a bit of a slippery slope? I think you have a good
argument, but you muddle it with this stuff. E.g. the following:

   - OTW contains some content that clearly violates the CoC
   - OTW is not necessary for operation of Gentoo
   - Moderating OTW is not currently happening to the council's
   satisfaction, and thus the CoC is being violated on a routine basis
   - It's unclear we have a plan for changing the OTW moderation, so our
   options are the two you proposed below.

This mostly has nothing to do with 'how much you hate OTW' and more to do
with actually enforcing policies you were elected to enforce and I'd (if I
actually believed the 4th item was true) would clearly support this vote.
But this item sounds like you are deleting OTW because you dislike it and
my answer is "that is not a policy I can support." In short, I don't think
this argument supports your conclusion, it erodes it because we shouldn't
make policy decisions based on what you like or dislike.


> * it caters to a set of users somewhat distinct from the rest of the forums
>   (e.g., >5000 posts in OTW, <100 elsewhere)
>

According to what data?

Looking at the past year:
select COUNT(*) as cnt, IF(phpbb_posts.forum_id=10,true, false) as forum,
phpbb_users.user_id as user from phpbb_users INNER JOIN phpbb_posts ON
phpbb_posts.poster_id=phpbb_users.user_id where phpbb_posts.post_time >
UNIX_TIMESTAMP(DATE_SUB(CURDATE(), INTERVAL 365 DAY)) and
phpbb_posts.poster_id IN (select DISTINCT(poster_id) from phpbb_posts where
forum_id=10 and post_time > UNIX_TIMESTAMP(DATE_SUB(CURDATE(), INTERVAL 365
DAY))) group by user, forum order by user, cnt, forum desc;

Which basically says "find everyone who posted in OTW in the past year,
group their posts by (COUNT, OTW, !OTW) and you will find that most of them
post in other forums fairly regularly. Are there people who only post in
OTW? Sure. Is it "everyone in OTW?" No.

I suspect the underlying issue is that OTW is dominated by a small number
of posters; I've tried to provide data to clarify the distribution of
posters (forgive my bad mysql.)

OTW has ~1.4 million posts total
OTW has ~10500 posts in the past 365 days.
The top poster has 1187 posts in OTW in the past 365 days (~1/10 posts)
The top 20 posters have 9251 posts in OTW in the past 365 days (9/10 posts
are these 20 people)
COUNT of all posters who posted to OTW in the past 365 days is 159, which
means for those 139 remaining users, they handle the remaining 1200 (10%)
of posts in OTW.

I avoided doing the analysis historically because there are tons of people
who posted like 100k times in 2008 and don't post anymore and they mess up
the numbers; so I stuck to the past 365 days of data.

If you want to conclude that "OTW is mostly a place for 20 people to chat"
I think the data supports this conclusion.
If you want to conclude that "The 20 people who chat in OTW mostly don't
chat in other forums" I think the data does not support this conclusion.


> * forum moderators have made clear they are not going to fulfill their
> roles
>   (e.g., regarding the code of conduct) in OTW, following a similar
> discussion
>   one year ago
>

If you want to say 'desultory has made it clear' I'd believe that argument.
I'm not really convinced the other moderators necessarily agree (but more
on this below.)


>
> This leaves us with two options:
>
> 1) shut down OTW
> or
> 2) replace or supplement forum moderators with people willing to fulfill
> the
>    moderator role in OTW
>

In 2019 I wrote:
---
Why do we specifically target the forums?
(i) Because it contains content that violates the CoC?
(ii) Because it contains content unrelated to Gentoo?
(iii) Because it contains content we find objectionable?
I'm trying to narrow down the scope here. Most UCG sites contain (i), and
(ii) and probably (iii). I have concerns that basically no one in the
council even uses the forum, we have no data that describes a problem on
the forum, and we are (as described in the 10/02 meeting log notes)
trying to legislate the job of a moderation team that we have essentially
failed to achieve any common ground with.
---

I continue to sustain that the forums contains i, i is primarily the
problem, and we have failed to convince the mods to do anything. Part of my
concern (again restating above) is that the argument used against OTW isn't
just i, but is also ii and iii and I find these arguments less relevant.

ii: If we banned every medium that had content unrelated to Gentoo, we
would likely have no mediums left.
iii: If we banned content that we found objectionable but didn't violate
the CoC, we should consider amending the CoC to cover that content and then
that relabels iii into i.

I personally don't find the situation very recoverable because in theory
I'd like to see the moderators moderate OTW more, but I think that ship has
sailed after repeated failed attempts at gaining that support.

-A


> I dont see 2) happen (for the simple reasons
> * that it will be difficult to find someone to do the work
> * and that noone has volunteered to do it over the past year
> ), so 1) it is.
>
> Cheers, Andreas
>
> --
> Andreas K. Hüttel
> dilfridge@g.o
> Gentoo Linux developer
> (council, qa, toolchain, base-system, perl, libreoffice)