Wedge

Revision: 890
Author: arantor
Date: 16:29:09, 25 July 2011
Message:
! Improve how timezones are handled, namely: 1) Don't try forcing use of Etc/ legacy timezones that are actually confusing by nature anyway, but actually attempt to query for proper timezone instead of estimating, 2) ensure an actual timezone will be set even if we don't have one in the DB for any reason as a fallback, 3) improve the selector in the admin panel to limit to only the regions of interest. (install.php, Load.php, ManageSettings.php)
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Modified : /trunk/Sources/Load.php
Modified : /trunk/Sources/ManageSettings.php
Modified : /trunk/other/install.php

This, in spades. Everything I've touched in the codebase is done so because that's how I think it should be made. Is that arrogant? Perhaps. Is it the right way? Possibly. But it is how I think it should work, and I'm prepared to back up my reasoning on everything, because I take the view that people are going to latch on to what we do and use and abuse it. That's life.

Because of that, because of the fact that people of smaller and larger minds than I and Nao will judge the work in the end, there are compromises being made - I'm more of the idealist in that I'm building it more for what I want it to be, not what others want it to be, and honestly I have no interest (and I'm prepared to vehemently defend this) in building features for a minority.

What has really pissed me off so much is that I asked a simple enough question, without any sense of obligation, of what feature someone would be interested in, with the specific proviso of 'assume I know nothing of this', and I've had three completely different features labelled under one banner. I can only conclude that the person making the request doesn't actually know what they want (because if they did, they wouldn't be in the current position of being unable to actually nail it down in a single definition that isn't really three different things under one banner), and when questioned on it, they have reacted defensively to it.

So let me reiterate in no uncertain terms.

* WP style trackback (i.e. a separate post that links to a pre-existing post and sends a form of auto-posted notification, to say 'hey, I linked to you, isn't that neat?' and for an automated notification of that fact to appear as a reply to the original post)

* Freedom of Moving Thoughts (the ability to have the same discussion in multiple places at once, flat threaded, so that if one copy is censored or tampered with, the discussion can continue elsewhere, with the extra benefit of spreading the discussion)

* Threaded views (the ability to have a single thread diverge off into multiple sub discussions, that can end up totally separate to the original source)


And this was labelled all under trackbacks. I was almost as frustrated with the feeling of demand as I was exasperated at the fact that I'd asked a simple enough question, specifically to judge what was being actually requested, especially as the private conversation I'd had on the subject just made it infinitely more confusing by mentioning different bits of each, leading me to believe that the person concerned just doesn't know what they want, other than features that they used before that won't even solve their problem from the sounds of it, even if they were implemented.[1]

As for the specific personal insults handed out in this thread, yes, there is an element of wolfpack about this. That's because we're two individuals working on it in the manner which we choose, unlike the expectation you seem to have that we are an organisation dedicated to serving your needs, which we're not.

The implication that I'm a whiz-kid who thinks my stuff is the best. Hardly. I have greater self confidence issues than most of you would ever realise, mostly because I'm so very good at hiding it. To be honest, watching Nao's code over the last year makes me feel rather inadequate because half of it I'd never have even thought of, and as for some of the rest, I suspect I could put a passable imitation together instead of what Nao coded.

As for the hint about not being able to work in a larger team... it depends on the team. If the team is disrespectful of the people in it, and have separate and hidden agendas, damn right I can't work in it. If the team has respect for each other, like the team I used to lead at a Fortune 500 company, it works incredibly well. But again, you're making the mistake of making this into something it's not. It's just two guys that have respect for each others' skills working on a common goal, nothing more. There's no bullshit, no hidden agenda, no backstabbing, no politics, other than what is brought here.

1.	Which is, if anything, even more reason for it not to be implemented. As ever, solve the PROBLEM not its SYMPTOMS.

-sigh- I asked what you wanted, yes, to ascertain whether it was desirable functionality or not to include as a core feature, not because I was saying that I would build something you were asking for. Your tone indicates that you feel as though we are going to include it, which is not the case in the slightest.

I just realised, there is a strange irony in what I'm proposing here: since half the stuff I'm suggesting revolves around per user permissions of a sort (or, at least, per user restrictions), that would actually require some of the effort of user-specific permissions that I've always been so against.

Though, to be honest, if you think about it, it's not really a problem: the only use cases anyone could ever give me about per user permissions were always per user restrictions, not per user permissions generally.

I've been mulling over exactly how I want to handle this on the 3 hour journey back home, and the conclusion I've come to is this: two slightly different ways of managing it.

The first is to set the generic stuff - that % warning means removing permissions generally. This would be for the main stuff, would see the removal of 'watched' status... seriously how many people actually USE that?

To clarify, the current warning levels are watched, moderated and muted (plus, naturally, banned) - I'm looking at making the 0-100% scale offer the following (in no particular order): post moderation, post/reply muting, PM muting[1], removal of avatar, removal of signature, media item post/comment muting and finally revoking ability to log in (typically at 95+%)

Additionally, the rules on how quickly the warning level drops should be altered; they shouldn't just drop at the same level across the board - it should be configurable per person really.

Then, just for fun, it should be configurable per person as to specific exceptions; you might have it so that 35% is the point at which post moderation cuts in, but that a certain person who is being a pain should be set to moderated regardless of anything else.


Lastly, and probably most importantly: I'm not managing post moderation through the permissions system, I fully intend to rip that out and replace it. While there is a certain elegance of using permissions to identify who can and can't post with/without moderation, the fact is it is actually a pain. Trying to explain to people how it should be set up is ridiculous, and bitter experience teaches me that the approach while convenient from a programming perspective, it's inconvenient from a user's perspective. So I need to rethink that too.

1.	I want to keep muting on posts and muting on PMs separate, so that people who have been muted can plead their case if the admin so wants.

On ubiquity: Gri is aware that FoMT is limited to SMF, he did ask me about the feasibility of porting it to other platforms a while ago.

On the facility as a whole: we're back to the standard question: what problem are we trying to solve? Trackbacks don't even solve the problem they were designed to solve properly, and any blog that's been around for a while will have a decent degree of trackback spam in it. On top of that, it doesn't solve the whole 'interesting discussion elsewhere' factor either, in fact the best way to do that is for an existing member, ideally participant, in the discussion to just post a little description and link to it rather than the other content saying "Hey look at me"

I suspect Clara's use is niche at best, and not really within the scope of this feature, but I'm not sure exactly what problem needs to be solved - though I AM sure trackbacks in either the WP style or cloned-thread style aren't the answer.

On RSS->posts, this is something that I have wondered about doing, it seems fairly common to add but we'd have to make sure we did it properly!

Let me clarify something, as I did have a few meaningful conversations with Gri a while ago and the only reason I issued him a moderation-level warning on arantor.org was because he didn't understand the concept of 'no.'

Trackbacks are designed solely for pointing between posts, so that if one blog post refers to another, the later post automatically notifies the original and appears as a reply with a snippet of the post, and the link to the newer post - the idea that the later post will "continue the discussion" and interested parties can continue the discussion elsewhere, but the reality ends up being "oh, I found this post, it's cool, isn't it?" and generating not-quite-spam.

Freedom of Moving Thoughts is something else entirely, it physically copies posts between forums so that two independent forums have the same actual discussion going on, this way there is no risk of sanctions being levied.

I'll reply to most of this later, but the one thing I will add is that the concept you're referring to at the end is a honeypot, something that have been set up to log spammers by the httpBL project...

OK, look at it this way: while the onward effect of spam (it being visible to Google and regular users) can be curtailed, it's still there and it's still something that has to be cleaned up by the moderators in some way, and it's a source of incoming stuff that wasn't there before.

As it happens, there is actually a small module of Bad Behaviour tied specifically to trackback spam...

Just because spammers don't get any payoff, doesn't mean they won't spam, it just  means that human spammers are discouraged (doesn't stop them trying!) and bots will do what they do anyway.l