Re: National Website in Japan (pressing for an action)

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Sat, May 26, 2001 at 12:09:23PM -0700 or thereabouts, Seth Nickell wrote:
> > That isnt the problem. In fact if gnotices fell down irrepairably it would be
> > a major plus point for the gnome project. Gnotices consists of nothing but
> > libel, defamation and actionable hate speech.
> 
> I'm inclined to agree. Theoretically I like the idea of having a place
> where people can discuss articles etc, but Gnotices is not that place.
> Pragmatically speaking it has turned into a place to troll, flame
> application developers, and drag people through the mud. We should

Absolutely. People are also able to post under other people's names.

Whilst it's easy to catch Gnome developers and ask whether that was
really them, it is not so easy to catch some of the other well-known
names on there. I emailed one, in fact, and found that the person in
question hadn't even seen Gnotices, and no, he hadn't posted the
(extremely rude about aspects of Gnome) opinions attributed to him.

This is just a crazy situation to have: and the person in question
took it a damn sight more gracefully than I would have. I'd have been
incandescent had my name been used. 

> evaluate gnotices based not on what it should be but on what it is. In
> that sense I would be very much in favour of shutting gnotices down, at
> least for a few months to see if we can bring it back "better".

As I understand it, the idea was to upgrade to the new improved
"people shouldn't be able to post jpgs of flayed faces using javascript
tricks anymore" version (for those who doubt, yes, this happened too) 
and then assess whether it had improved after a month or so. So I 
guess we're in that assessment period.

Really, we need to decide whether gnotices is a site for news, a la
gnome-announce, or a site for ... well, um. Slashdot-substitute.

Telsa