• A more appropriate place

keza:

This site was not supposed to be just a forum. The problems you are trying to deal with will not be solved by creating threads within the forum.

A thread for complaints about mistreatment would continuously be placed at the top of the forum list - distracting attention from the topics we want to address.

A thread on minimal standards of debate/discussion (and site policies generally) may well be useful. But the result needs to be linked prominently not just from a sticky admin posting at the top of the  forum but from the main navigation structure of the main site (which currently does not exist).

While the main site remains non-existant there is NO WAY to resolve problems with the forum.

My previous efforts to force discussion of the direction of the site failed and I have had to just put up with you running it the way you want to.

That way does not work and cannot be made to work in the way you propose.

Only another half a dozen equivalents of cyberman, or sydneyguy15, or owenss would be sufficient to make the current forum useless, let alone half a dozen more daleks and bpors.

Given the current situation that result remains quite inevitable the moment the site attracts any attention at all. Consequently running things the way you choose to is inevitably and inextricably connected with not attracting any attention to or achieving any audience or participation for this web site.

The central feature of the Plone software is that it allows for authorised people who do NOT have management control of the site to review articles for publication and (perhaps after polishing) place them at the appropriate levels of prominence within a navigation structure that people passing by can easily find their way in to see what we are on about.

Unless and until you both understand that yourself and explain it to others, provide the navigation structure and train people to use it the site simply will not work. Interesting material will continue to be submitted to the forum, which was and will remain essential for developing and continuing any site, but will never be gathered into a developing collection that people can work from and link to in raising the level of discussion.

Instead the interesting material will continue to be buried in the rest, discouraging people from writing it while the equal prominence given to trivia will encourage the trivials.

This can only result in repetition, confusion and giving up. You have to think of the site as PRIMARILY an organized collection of material helpful to people who have just found the main page with participants PRIMARILY engaged in outreach by starting debates at OTHER sites that attract interest here (rather than debates here that distract participants from engaging elsewhere).

Then discussions here may still have some of the existing problems but it will at least be possible to just reference (and/or improve and re-submit) an existing article in the navigation structure that explains a view on some aspect because one can find it and know that others are also likely to see it, while the trivial comments are just ignored instead of swamping any serious work.

Hostile posts (from vastly largely numbers of people) would then be encouraged to escape from the non-prominent parts of the navigation structure (a fate much like the junk forum) by raising both their relevance and level to the point where a participant actually wants to reply rather than feeling obliged to.

Incidentally complaints about posting "bare links" without explanation and also complaints about complere re-posts from elsewhere are also a direct result of your decision not to setup a facility for "raw links". Such links would be welcomed or ignored in a "links pool" without any problem since people browsing it would not find it irritating to ignore links from people whose links have usually proved ignorable rather than being irritated by them being presented as some sort of response that requires a serious reply in an ongoing discussion. Likewise full re-posts would just be submitted for review and accepted or rejected by reviewers rather than inflicted on unwilling audiences.

You appeared to have later shown some signs of finally understanding some of these issues in your (unfinished) article on the need for a new modus operandi. But that was more than 6 months ago and the post I am responding to (in the completely irrelevant topic where it was posted) shows a clear relapse to imagining that you can solve the problems with the old modus operandi.

Please review those links and also the earlier attempt to organize discussion of site direction. I remain currently unable to resume work at all, let alone constructively contribute to a serious attempt to help make this site viable but my silence should be taken as confirmation that what you are trying to do isn't the right way rather than acquiescence in it.

The following is a post from Arthur that originally appeared in the "Iraq Developments" thread:

________________________________________________________________________________

"The post that was here from Arthur has been removed from this thread.  I will repost it in a more appropriate location when I get a chance."

^^^^^^^

Above was from keza. I have now reposted it myself  in a more appropriate place (which however remains no substitute for an actually appropriate place like an admin forum in a site that is collectively administered).

Result is that the above alone looks like I spontaneously decided to move it and replace with that message myself.

So I have added this note.

Whenever a post is removed and a "tombstone" left it should be explicitly signed by the person who did the edit so as to avoid confusion as the tombstone appears to be written by the original author and can thus cause confusion.

Not doing this appears to have become habitual (especially youngmarxist) when moving nuisance posts to the junk forum.

It should be mandatory to ALWAYS include the name of the person who did the edit. This ought to be built into the software but doing it manually is essential within the forum as the software does not have a "last edited by" field so one would be left guessing.

While a general reference to "the junk forum" or to "deleted" is fine for total junk, when an actual move is made it should always be put in the new location first so that a link can be placed in the tombstone from the original location to the new location. There is usually some reason for it having been in the original location (eg see the post following this one that mine was a reply to, and the degeneration of the thread before that. Leaving a tombstone that says it will be reposted "when I get a chance" is bound to cause either disorganization, confusion or resentment and waste other peoples time as well as your own.

Incidentally I initiated this thread because it was easier to start a new one than an attempt to just keep on looking for a suitable old thread to pickup from despite the disorganization of the site.

Arthur