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

[Michael Snoyman]

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 9:06 AM, Nicolas Pouillard
<nicolas.pouillard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Cool, consider it done ;). Actually, it really is done, I just have to
push the code to the server.

Also, now 10 random profiles will be displayed on the homepage. Only
"verified users" will be displayed here. I'm also considering adding a
new status as well: real picture, so that only people with real images
(not cartoons, not identicons) can show up on the homepage. I think
this might give a more professional feel. Thoughts?

Michael