[Haskell-cafe] Haskellers.com recent changes (and I need some volunteers)

[Nicolas Pouillard]

On Mon, 11 Oct 2010 05:50:32 +0200, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:
> Sorry to everyone for not getting back so quickly, I kept getting
> errors from postfix when I tried sending mail to the cafe. Hopefully
> this one will go through. As I see it, two open issues are "flagging"
> and "real Haskellers".
> 
> Flagging: this was simply a mistake in terminology on my part. I've
> replaced it with "Report this user." It should be used for either
> inappropriate content, spam, or someone who's just clearly not part of
> the community (eg, "Lol, I don't know Haskell, I had Cocoa Puffs for
> breakfast"). I'm purposely being vague about this; if a user *thinks*
> there's a problem, it shouldn't take an admin more than a few seconds
> to investigate it.
> 
> Now the more important question about real Haskellers: I think I
> mentioned before implementing the feature that I was a little bit
> nervous about doing so. The main reason I went ahead and did it anyway
> was we were getting some... strange gravatars showing up on the
> homepage. This problem was solved automatically when I added sorting
> by years of experience (no one can object to Simon PJ and Lennart
> being on the homepage of course), but the problem with that system is
> *anyone* can just set their start year to 1990 and get homepage status
> until an admin blocks him/her.
> 
> So for the moment, real Haskeller is a minimal whitelisting system,
> simply intended to prevent people from gaming the system. I've
> probably chosen bad terminology, and by not explaining this upset a
> lot of people, my apologies. The point here is not to make the real
> Haskeller status exclusive, but just to give an extra level of
> protection. If people really think this is a bad idea, we can take it
> out. However, keep in mind that the community already seems to favor
> whitelists (the wiki requires admin intervention for an account, same
> on HackageDB).

I think that "Verified accounts" sounds more appropriate than "Real
Haskellers", then.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Pouillard
http://nicolaspouillard.fr