Is it possible to increase freedom in the Fedora project?

Ask Fedora
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 “old” information, go and read it, you will might change your point of view about users and would finally start “to do” 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 … over the Announcement to a visibility, which you can access over one URL like discussion.fedoraproject.org.

Edit: I might miss interpreted this :
“don’t seem to properly represent your overall contributions though.” (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 …

1 Like
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

I’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 article’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 ‘Valid to’ 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 article’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 ‘Rules’ described, and sometimes moderators reserve the rights for certain operations, but these situations are always agreed within the ‘Rules’.

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.

3 Likes
43

@steppybug I do not understand why you open a discussion if you then don’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 “grey fox jumping” but also others (including “old topic”), 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: “fix typos or other mistakes in your own posts for up to a month”)
  • 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 don’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 “edit” 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 ain’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 “edited”, 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 “bad compromise” 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:

9 Likes
44

@py0xc3,

Thank you for bringing this up. Though I am still interested in seeing improvements in this community I am not sure positive change is possible when actions like yours are taken unilaterally.

Not good, not good.

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.

1 Like
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.

3 Likes
47

It sure would be great if the process were transparent.

Why is what I do in cleaning up my own contributions untennible yet, even in this current topic there is an example of @ngompa contributions being cleaned up in similar manner? Seems hypocritical.

In the short time I’ve been involved here there have been a lot more contributions being cleaned up over time. Is that just a perk of having more power than normal users?

48

(post deleted by author)

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 “edit” 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 “grey fox is jumping”.

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 “freedom” of one disrupts the “freedom” 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 don’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:

7 Likes
50

The only aggressive behavior on this topic has been yours. Feel free to delete this topic as I will happily let it go so you are not tempted any more.

51

(post deleted by author)

52

This has been mentioned before but I will try to paraphrase what is relevant.

Being able to edit your post is a good thing, However the intent of editing is to improve the content with newer and better content or to correct errors.

If your post has been replied to and changing the content would make the reply irrelevant or misleading then most users will often make the edit and with a following post will indicate that the content of the earlier post was edited so later readers can see what was changed and why. The reason for that is to keep a valid timeline as to what was said and when. This is similar and consistent with what is done in a verbal communication.

Deletion of posts or major changes can easily make the entire discussion of the topic on the forum disjointed and unintelligible. Similar to what happens when a person enters a verbal conversation and starts adding comments without waiting to fully understand the topic or where the discussion is headed. Their comments may be totally irrelevant to the topic because they do not have the full picture at the beginning.

Posts should be on topic and as much as possible relevant to the then current stage of discussion while later deletions or editing of the initial content is disruptive.

You may note that many times when a post is edited there is the word EDIT added with the new/changed content to make it clear what was done. Some even go so far as to strike out the erroneous or irrelevant content and add updated info – yet very few totally delete their posts.

4 Likes
53

In addtion to what Jeff said in his reply…

It should be a choice then :stuck_out_tongue:

Sure, you can choose to contribute or not.

You can’t choose to join a community, provide a bunch of input and then
decide everyone should drop all your contributions and anything that
came from them, leaving them broken and in a shambles.

Is information preservation more beneficial from a financial standpoint? More info available, more hits/popularity, rolling-community discussions will keep non-relevant posts hidden. Who actually benefits from old/outdated info existing permanently and multiple thread creations? Information quantity vs quality?

There’s no financial angle here I can think of.

Contributing to a community is done with good-intent, but changing or removing info is restricted for reasons that seemingly don’t benefit the original contributor.

Once the original contributor contributed, thats part of the shared
community.

I grow and change like the community and project does; I might feel strongly about a post one day, then see how it might look differently the next; that’s what editing is for!

Sure, but once people have replied and discussed your post, removing it
makes all their contributions at best confusing and at most completely
worthless. You are putting yourself over everyone who has interacted
with you and anyone who would come along later and learn from your
contribution.

Maybe it’s too off-topic; delete. Maybe someone edited their post months earlier and I want to change mine to keep the thread relevant or add something useful learned later: they got the edit within the age limit but I (might) not be able to. I don’t want to edit my own content nefariously.

There are legit reasons to edit things.
mass deleting isn’t one IMHO.

6 Likes
54

10 posts were split to a new topic: Automatic closure of stale topics in Ask Fedora

64

Since long I was thinking a ask-fedora section in discussion would make sense. If we put it in Site-Feedback then the whole world likes to give its opinion, while on discussion it selves we could restrict it to TL3+. In the end we do the work and know the system as it works for now.