Is it possible to increase freedom in the Fedora project?

Ask Fedora
24

Please @hricky and @thommy
Lets stick to the OP topic overall.
These side arguments are distracting.

This seems to imply to all the preceding posts and is not limited to the OP.

This is mostly off topic

Most of the suggestions seem to go against improving value and the implementation of auto deletions certainly would go against the freedom of users to have their thoughts and posts remain to assist others in problem solving. Thus greatly reducing the value.

The title says nothing about value, and the arguments in the OP seem more about privacy.

25

Some of the requests in the initial post is related to Fedora documentation, so I donā€™t think suggesting to contribute to it is some random branch discussion about utterly unnecessary things, nor it is a distracting side argument.

However, itā€™s entirely possible that Iā€™m missing the point here.

26

I agree with this point. The following back and forth was the intent of my comment.

27

@computersavvy Telling me to stick to the topic after I was requesting exactly that is not helping either.

I simply wanted to point out that non of the suggestions IN THE OP are increasing any freedom IMHO. Everything else was just answers off topic stuff. So please just answer if you have anything to contribute or oppose to that statement of mine, otherwise donā€™t tag me please.

28

I have to acknowledge that I completely misread your post.

I was left with the mistaken impression that you were referring to the responses to the initial post, not the original post itself.

Please accept my apologies.

29

Accepted :handshake:, also I am sorry if I did leave too much room for interpretation. Now lets move on :+1:

31

Again, I agree with cleaning up topics. But IMHO, deleting individual posts within a topic creates a bigger mess for someone who comes along at a later time to try to make sense of.

Youā€™ve identified a good area for improvement. Thanks for bringing it up for discussion here.

Thinking about the problem just now, what if we were to set an automatic deletion timer to one year from the date of the original post for the topic? Since there are two Fedora Linux releases per year, that should keep most of the relevant content and discard (mostly) irrelevant content. If we used the forumā€™s API to perform the deletions by script, we should be able to customize the rules about what exactly gets deleted. I would start by restricting the auto-deletions to things posted to the Ask Fedora category and I would exclude any topic where the original post was tagged ā€œkeep meā€. So if a user wants to reply to a post and not have their post subject to auto-deletion, they should use the ā€œreply as new topicā€ function and tag their new topic with the ā€œkeep meā€ tag.

I cannot guarantee that such a thing will be implemented, but if it could be done, would that be satisfactory? Thatā€™s about the best I can come up with off the top of my head. Other suggestions or improvements to this suggestion are welcome. :slightly_smiling_face:

32

While not quite the same, a less ā€œintrusiveā€ proposal was to auto-close topics after a certain period of time (measured from the time of either the first post or the last post). The feature is there in Discourse, but the suggestion never got implemented.

Also worth mentioning that oneā€™s freedom ends where anotherā€™s freedom begins. Not everyone would be happy knowing that their posts would be deleted in one yearā€™s time. Deleting old threads is not the same as deleting old emails, since the former is the result of several contributions (however small), whereas the latter only affects the mailbox of the user opting for deletion.

I would rather have old topics archived and hidden from search engines. That way such topics would not be found from outside of Discourse, whereas Discourse users would (hopefully) notice that a topic found was already archived, meaning its value is rather historical. Unfortunately hiding topics from search engines doesnā€™t seem to be an option for archived topics, but only for the more restrictive unlisted ones.

33

I think this is not a good idea. What if older threads contain solutions which still are usable but havenā€™t been around in the forum since then? Example: Low volume

34

That is a bad thing, just imagine Wikipedia would delete all articles that are not edited once a year.

35

We should not be deleting old topics from these forums. How many times have you googled something and found a 10 year old topic somewhere that answers your question correctly?

36

So, hereā€™s my take on things:

I donā€™t think we should treat discussion as a knowledge base or a documentation site,
because its not those things (although there is overlap).

Instead, IMHO itā€™s several things:

The ask fedora side of things is a troubleshooting and general support
area, but the point is not to have a single issue and a single solution
for each topic. The point of the journey is not to arrive. The point is
to learn how to debug things, look at things based on what information
others ask for and where it leads. After the immediate issue is solved,
itā€™s still useful for:

  • related issues that might trigger you to gather information mentioned.
  • historical digging to see things like what kind of debugging was done
    for some related problem.
  • how in general to gather info/improve things for the next users
  • who is a helpful and knowledgable person in an area. You may have some
    new issue, but donā€™t know where to start and you could mention someone
    who might be a subject matter expert to chime in.
  • Learning how to help others, what sort of questions are
    good/bad/useful? What are some common fixes/things to do?

Editing posts much later to ā€˜correctā€™ them breaks the history.
It means that something that made sense and was useful historically no
longer does and just looks wrong and confuses history.
(Editing posts soon after they are made is just fine to clarify
or correct issues of course).

The project discussion and Team workflows are where we as a community discuss new
changes or propose new solutions or directions for the project.
Deleting or editing after the fact posts here means that some of our
collective history disappears and leaves jarring gaps. The posts here
are still useful for:

  • Seeing how some decision was made, what input it had, perhaps to
    revisit or change something later.
  • Seeing what questions were asked and how they were answered (or not)
    at the time, perhaps to reask them or revisit them.
  • Improving how we process things like changes or proposals, by
    looking at how older ones were discussed, etc

Editing posts long after the fact here also breaks history and makes
it much less clear how things were decided/discussed.

The water cooler probibly has the least historical value, but it still
has some. You can look back and someone and how they interacted with
the rest of the community, or look up something someone mentioned there
that sparks some creativity you have.

So, IMHO, if you are contributing to a community you should leave
your posts for the community to use and grow from.

40

I do not understand why deleting your posts is increasing freedom here.

41

This comment just shows how bad you know the community and their members.
There are channels as former IRC, now Matrix, Mailing Lists, Git, *hub, *lab, fedora-forge, etc

If you would follow all this channels you could know him better and you would realize that in this moment you did stepping into a blunder. So before demand to delete ā€œoldā€ information, go and read it, you will might change your point of view about users and would finally start ā€œto doā€ instead of just being demanding.

Discourse is a tool to simplify communication and is even bringing other platforms like Fedora Magazine, Fedora Blog, Meetings, Events ā€¦ over the Announcement to a visibility, which you can access over one URL like discussion.fedoraproject.org.

Edit: I might miss interpreted this :
ā€œdonā€™t seem to properly represent your overall contributions though.ā€ (he does much more, was it that what you tried to say?)

However just commenting others will also not give more freedom for your selves here ā€¦

42

Hej,

TLDR: Message Board is not Knowledge Base.

There seems to be a bit of confusion, you deem important to apply tools known typically from Knowledge Bases, to a Message Board, and the main justification is the fact that some parts of content (topics, posts) contain information which is no longer relevant, or the relevance is hard to qualify, but is constantly fed into AI models, which blends it alltogether.

KNOWLEDGE BASES

Iā€™m writing this based mostly on my hands-on experience with Knowledge Management that functions in ServiceNow. The most common model used there, is to create one or more Knowledge Bases (KB), each has a person who is KB Owner, optional KB Managers, and set of basic configurations, like Validity of articles, Categorizations, allowed templates, and User Criteria (who can read, who cannot, and who may contribute). By default two types of workflows are available for Publishment (Publish Approval, and Instant Publish), same applies to Retirement of an article that resides in that Knowledge Base.

Article itself, apart from Title and Body, also has various other attributes, like a language, name of KB where it is stores, version, author, and Ownership Group.

When article is drafted, and is to be published, if KB is set for Instant Publish, such action happens immediately. For KBs that have Publish Approval, once author wants to Publish his/hers Draft, presses Publish button, the article moves to Review state, and request for approval is generated and sent out to each member of articleā€™s Ownership Group, in case such group is missing, KB Manager or KB Owner is asked to approve. Once article is approved it gets into Published state, and if Rejected, then moves back to Draft.

A Published article is visible in Service Portal (Web Front) to users that are allowed to read articles in particular KB. It gets a ā€˜Valid toā€™ date set according to default Validity setup on the KB level.

What happens when Valid to date is approaching?

  • Notification is sent to Article Author that article should be reviewed.
  • To review article, the author (or other member of articleā€™s Ownership Group) has to Checkout the article, edit if needed, provide next Valid to date (which is not more than default allowed for Knowledge Base), and press Publish (triggering publish approval workflow again).
  • Articles that passed their Valid to date, and were not reviewed, move to state Outdated, and are no longer visible on Service Portal, but are still retrievable from the backend, by more advanced platform users.
  • Article which was reviewed and approved for Publishment, is again visible on Portals, it retains its KB number, but the record itself is new, it has increased version number value, and different record sys_id.

Feedback options

  • Feedback to articles is given by various means, but two are the most popular
    • Comments - users may be allowed to leave a comment under the article
    • Mark as Helpful (Yes / No)
  • Author / Reviewer of an article may use comments to improve the article.
  • There may be mechanism that generates a Knowledge Feedback Task each time user selects that article was Not Helpful (a justification is required) - this creates KFT ticket, and assigns it to Ownership Group / Author to act on feedback.

MESSAGE BOARD

As you can spot, whilst article authors at Knowledge Bases, understand that the article may be modified and reviewed by other people, they agree for the Ownership Group to assume authority over the article, and assume repsonsibility to wield its lifecycle each time the review time approaches.

Authors of Posts at Message Boards, ususally assume that no-one would edit the contents of their post. With small exceptions for automated mechanisms that e.g., asterisk slurs, specific well-documented bots. The general assumption is that admins/moderators, while are in position to technically modify any user post title/contents, they are not excercising that power. (Some Message Boards, have ā€˜Rulesā€™ described, and sometimes moderators reserve the rights for certain operations, but these situations are always agreed within the ā€˜Rulesā€™.

Timestamps

Message Boards Posts and Comments have timestamps, some boards implement additional options for categorizations applicable to end-users. By checking when post was created we may (not instantly) relate it to specific release of application / system it tackles. That needs a bit of holistic and often specialist knowledge, and here AI models that scrap message boards are often failing, trying to condense discussions without being able to appropriate it to specific release/version of discussed software/issue.

Retired topics

Your point to have ability to exclude certain scopes from serach results, e.g., of retired software versions, or filtering to narrow to specific version of software is great. And is a valid input to admins/development team here, about some tagging system, or introducing categorization options, or making hierarchy more readable.

But none of that would happen unless:

a) A Product Catalog is added to MB and maintained

b) Product Versioning is applied, e.g., as a Tagging mechanism

c) Ability to attribute Posts/Comments with selected Product/Version,

d) Persuading users to tag proper software models and versions in their posts/comments

e) Making sure users are tagging correctly.

BR & Happy New Year!

M.T.J.

43

@steppybug I do not understand why you open a discussion if you then donā€™t care about it.

We have now received more complaints of you rendering the work of others useless through exploiting the editing function, this time a whole topic with many posts containing noteworthy time investment to work on your technical problem in depth. When you started to replace tech questions/answers with sentences of the ā€œgrey fox jumpingā€ but also others (including ā€œold topicā€), your actions started to reach the area of vandalism.

You have been and seem to keep rendering the work of other community members useless, we keep receiving complaints, you ignore people who try to talk with you, whereas you ignore when the deletion function is no longer available and then exploit the edit function for something it is (quite obviously) not intended, I advise you to:

  • no longer use the edit function for deletions or vandalism, but only for edits that increase value of the argument already contained in the post (the formal description of the use case of this function in our Discourse user guide: ā€œfix typos or other mistakes in your own posts for up to a monthā€)
  • no longer do excessive/wide attempts for deletions of posts that are already part of the context of others, who invested their time, when the deletion would render posts of others useless, unless the content proves harmful (unexpected outcomes of commands or so).

If you want to do any deletions in future, please use the official form, so that a RH team can verify the legitimacy of your request and process it as far as legally required:
Personal Data Request Form . As far as I know, the form needs to be filled for each case, I donā€™t know if it will work if you merge many cases into one form, but that will not be our decision.

Otherwise, if more complaints come up with subsequent cases like the described ones, I will lock you down on TL1 as interim mitigation and ask the moderation group to find a consensus on any compliant long term solution or keep the interim one in place. We never had to enforce the rules about Discourse functions, but could so far rely that the technical restrictions suffice to keep the outcome an acceptable compromise to everybody, but in this case, unfortunately, too much disadvantages are caused for the majority.

You cannot motivate people to invest time in posting, and then render their work useless, in now over 712 deletions, not counting your ā€œeditā€ exploitations.

If you disagree with the concept of Discourse, you are free to avoid using it and focus on other channels. That way, others can focus their time on topics that ainā€™t deleted, in order to maximize the value of their time.

I reverted the recent edit as vandalism [supplement: I just saw it is two topics ā€œeditedā€, I reverted both]. If you want to delete it, please fill out the form. And do so also for future cases. We can no longer process your deletion requests in the Discourse team given the harm they cause to others. Hope you understand that we are forced to make a ā€œbad compromiseā€ between your interest and that of many others.

Your right for anonymization remains untouched of course.

What you consider freedom destroys the work of others, and I no longer want to spend my contribution time to handle the complaints :frowning:

45

Sadly your actions have the exact opersite effect.
You are damaging the community.

Please stop.

As Chris said if you find Discuss a poor communication channel you are free to stop using it.

46

Please be aware that the action taken was not unilateral. Discussion of your behavior and the affects it has on topics here has been discussed among community members for some time.

You continue to take action that disrupts communications in threads where you participate and action was (and will be) taken (as much as possible) to minimize that disruption without preventing your ability to participate.

49

With regards to the post you mentioned in your flag, there is a guide that elaborates already in 2021 how disrupting it is to delete large amounts of posts. There is sufficient guides and elaborations of Discourse (and its functions and intentions) on Fedora and upstream, explaining why this behavior is inevitably disrupting the community and Discourse.

Technical functions are there for a reason, among others, to avoid the need for bureaucratic rules. There is a reason why deletions are no longer possible after some time. And the idea and elaborations of Discourse should make it reasonable why that is intended. I already elaborated the definition of ā€œeditā€ from one of our guides, although I think no rule is necessary to understand that it is not compliant to use the edit function as deletion function or to replace useful content with fun sentences like the ā€œgrey fox is jumpingā€.

There is no rule that says we have to take our private time to process your deletions (which includes using our private time to render the work of others useless). We did this so far out of goodwill, as the cases we earlier had did not cause disruption or damage to others, and we want our users to have a good experience, but our goodwill ends when the ā€œfreedomā€ of one disrupts the ā€œfreedomā€ of many others, regularly.

If you cannot understand our intentions and reasons, I am very sorry about that, and I can only repeat that you might want to engage on another channel if Discourse does not fit your expectations. Concerning details of what can be deleted and how, see your recent flag: all rights about your account remain of course, but deletions will be restricted to those legally obligated, through the mentioned form. Deletions that are not legally obligated are likely to be not processed.

The conditions I elaborated in my earlier post apply, including the use of edits for vandalism.

I donā€™t think that any more useful communication can come out of this topic, as it feels to become repetitive and I see a risk for it to develop more aggressively. I therefore will no longer engage here to avoid such a development. I hope everyone understands :frowning:

50

(post deleted by author)