No more leafing through the General Chit-Chat and finding irritating rants. They’d all be contained in one convenient, easily ignored location.
Thread starts or turns out as a rant somewhere else? It can be quickly and easily moved to the RANT forum cat. and conveniently ignored.
Tell me this isn’t a great idea!
Plus, people who come into the forums spoiling for a fight will know exactly where to go, saving them the hassle of searching through the regular threads for rants!
In truth, the mods and admins have discussed MANY times internally about deleting all non-support specific forums, such as CHIT-CHAT and SOAPBOX.
Some of us are not interested in providing a venue for RANTS. Others are interested in providing such a outlet.
So you can be assured any suggestion that there be a RANT subforum area in addition to SOAPBOX and CHIT-CHAT will have a very difficult pass to get approved by the MODs and ADMINs. Its far to say that SOAP BOX and CHIT-CHAT are both on very thin ice and their utility to the community is constantly being debated internally.
Be really great to put a Rant forum to stick them, and keep it from being indexed by Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. so when people are searching for something in openSUSE it doesn’t bring up the useless rant threads with valid, helpful threads/blogs/documentation.
Okay, this brings up the issue of soapbox and chit-chat. I think these are great and serve the larger purpose of “community building.” The project seems to be saying every other day in every other way that this is inCREDibly desirable - building the community through shared vision, interests, goals, etc. That stuff doesn’t come through support questions.
On the other hand, rants don’t build community. They are not constructive in any way. Constructive ranting is okay. It looks maybe like this:
> What are the developers of Amarok thinking? blah blah…
> You should be able to set custom sources for online cover art tool!!!
> What? You agree!? If I post to Amarok’s forums/email this idea, you’ll support it?
> Let’s do it!!
But notice what happened in line #2: a positive suggestion.
I’m just saying that if the OPS aren’t going to delete/warn/ban ranters (who offer NOTHING positive/constructive in their ranting), they could at least quarantine them or let them self-segregate.
And again I say that soapbox and chit-chat are good, IMHO.
soapbox appears to offer more than just rants. Strong Opinions doesn’t necessarily mean Rants, it could something positive while rants are, by nature, not.
I believe in freedom of speech, and it’s wrong to remove those forums. If look ourselves as a community, there is no point in trying to silence even negative criticism (I leave that for Fedora and others), this is where we can be different.
Instead of bashing down trolls and rants, we should actually be nice to them and at least listen to them, because despite of their negative points, there is usually some truth in that as well.
Don’t shutdown those forums please, we need a way to understand our users, and some of us actually do care about what’s happening around. Some posts we take stuff to improve ourselfs, from others we can use them as pure amusement… it’s like a free ticket to circus.
We will never please everyone, but we can for sure give everyone a shot to steam off.
On Thu, 18 Nov 2010 17:36:01 +0000, ketheriel wrote:
> I believe in freedom of speech, and it’s wrong to remove those forums.
> If look ourselves as a community, there is no point in trying to silence
> even negative criticism (I leave that for Fedora and others), this is
> where we can be different.
Free speech (in the US) is protected by the first amendment, however the
first amendment applies to government restrictions on speech. It has
nothing to do with how rules are set up in a private venue such as an
online forum.
There are standards of behaviour here (and in all online communities).
For those who want to rant about something, there are plenty of other
places to do it, just like there are plenty of places for political
discourse, religious talk, etc.
This is not one of those places (for politics/religion).
The chit-chat and soapbox forums aren’t going anywhere for the forseeable
future. What oldcpu is saying is that the topic does come up on
occasion. I do bring it up myself (with regards to soapbox) because I
often do not see the utility in having a place where things eventually
digress into either personal flame wars or circular arguments that just
won’t stop.
Those types of discussions make an impression on new users visiting the
forum, and I have expressed concern (and remain concerned) about the
impression we give to prospective members of the community by allowing
that type of behaviour to continue.
Even though the ability to contribute is restricted by registration, how can you describe an internet based forum as “private”, when the proceedings are mostly open globally to anyone with internet access?
It’s up to the mods and admins to set up rules, period. This does not touch “freedom of speech” at all, it seems like some misunderstand this term quite a bit; it’s not up to a forum to publish any opinion possible. After all, this is a technical forum about an operating system.
Frankly, chit chat and soapbox are one reason why I have very mixed feelings towards forums.opensuse.org. I do visit six or eight forums regularly, and f.os.org has by far the worst ratio of useful posts to trash. Rants, insulting remarks against other operating systems (even when they are Linux) and offtopic comments are quite common here, so I very much share hendersjs concerns about f.os.org possibly giving a bad impression about the openSUSE / Linux community.
Flamewars and the like happen in pretty much any forum, because when there’s a platform, sooner or later there will be a troll too. The common practise is to simply close the respective thread, warn the troll and (if one repeats those actions) banning. While this should be well balanced to avoid members feeling like being observed all the time, the approach to just let it roll simply wastes time, because many of us feel the need to feed that troll. I think that’s pretty natural too.
As I said, this is a technical forum. It’s okay to have a place to simply chat away with each other, but most actual rant threads are obvious after the first post. Frankly, I think it’s quite a bad idea to call a subforum “Soapbox”, to me it even sounds like an invitation to trolls.
If it were not for a very tiny group of “technically minded” users (at least in the sections I read regularly but I don’t think it is completely different in other sections), this forum would be a giant trash dump.
Sometimes it is really hard to say if one is using openSUSE because of the community or despite of it, isn’t it?
Personally, I have given up -at least here- in trying to “teach” (new) users how to - additionally to solving their problem - maybe get an idea what’s “under the hood” and starting to understand why XYZ is the solution for problem ABC as it is just a waste of time here.
P.S.
Would it be possible to split the forum’s account from my OBS-account?
I wouldn’t mind if this account here could be deleted as long as the OBS-account could be kept.
I’m not sure if this is possible (actually I used OBS for a few months until I found out that “automagically” I also have an account here).
Did you just tag onto the last post in front of you, without addressing the question pertaining to a quote of @hendersj, but why would you? I would prefer that you didn’t tag onto my post with your rant about this forum, thank you.
On Thu, 18 Nov 2010 19:36:01 +0000, consused wrote:
> Even though the ability to contribute is restricted by
>> registration, how
> can you describe an internet based forum as “private”, when the
> proceedings are mostly open globally to anyone with internet access?
It’s not operated by the government, it’s operated by a private
organization.
The operators of a forum determining what is and isn’t acceptable content
in a forum is not government censorship no matter how you slice it.
On Thu, 18 Nov 2010 22:06:02 +0000, Akoellh wrote:
> Would it be possible to split the forum’s account from my OBS-account?
Not really, no - it’s all handled by one credential system. Deleting
accounts tends to mess with message continuity, and the continuity is
needed for archival purposes.
> Some of us are not interested in providing a venue for RANTS. Others
> are interested in providing such a outlet.
Rants will happen anyway. If there is no such a place to give vent, they
will explode in the really technical forums, where they do damage. So
better have them in an obvious place, which people that don’t want them can
easily avoid.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.2 x86_64 “Emerald” at Telcontar)
You appear to have answered a different question about “government”, “acceptable content”, and “censorship”. My question was relatively simpler. You used the term “private venue” to describe a forum. How can a venue be described as private if it’s exposed to the global public, as this one clearly is?
BTW, the only connection between “government” and freedom of speech was introduced by you in the same post. In an international context, the subject of freedom of speech (whether relevant or not to the soapbox/chitchat issue) is not defined by some amendment to the US Constitution or any other national legislation. For many, it’s an aspiration, especially if one lives in a place that doesn’t have it.
I don’t really care whether there is a soapbox or chitchat sub-forums. However I am more open to persuasion by arguments in support of their usefulness, rather than those about corrupting newcomers, or so-called trashy or non-technical content (one isn’t forced to read it, or post there).
> We have one, and it is called “SOAP BOX”.
>
> In truth, the mods and admins have discussed MANY times internally
> about deleting all non-support specific forums, such as CHIT-CHAT and
> SOAPBOX.
Why? These forums (fora?) are about a community. Support is not the only
thing a community needs. Venting an opinion, idea, … is just about as
usefull as reporting a specific problem. It helps getting a feeling for more
generic disconforts, desired directions to explore and subjects to focus on.
> Some of us are not interested in providing a venue for RANTS. Others
> are interested in providing such a outlet.
It’s a simple setup away, no need for any support or even moderation. Do
read it, of course.
> So you can be assured any suggestion that there be a RANT subforum area
> in addition to SOAPBOX and CHIT-CHAT will have a very difficult pass to
> get approved by the MODs and ADMINs. Its far to say that SOAP BOX and
> CHIT-CHAT are both on very thin ice and their utility to the community
> is constantly being debated internally.
(really, genuinly) Sorry to say it, but that sounds like a managment’s point
of view. I don’t believe they deserve a place in an open source project. They
almost suggest the commnity should serve the team, rather than the other way
round.
On Fri, 19 Nov 2010 02:06:03 +0000, consused wrote:
> BTW, the only connection between “government” and freedom of speech was
> introduced by you in the same post. In an international context, the
> subject of freedom of speech (whether relevant or not to the
> soapbox/chitchat issue) is not defined by some amendment to the US
> Constitution or any other national legislation. For many, it’s an
> aspiration, especially if one lives in a place that doesn’t have it.
That’s fine, but the operators of any online forum have a responsibility
to set and enforce rules and a standard of behaviour.
And that’s what the staff does here, and I think (though I’m biased,
obviously, as a member of staff) that we generally do a pretty good job
of it. It’s not an easy job to do.
