Editor's Daily Blog

The price of freedom

My wife's email includes offers to lengthen appendages she doesn't have by 27%. The spam filter finds most of them, but she has to take the time to delete them and once in a while comes across a graphic picture of a squirrel or a topless woman. Spam, like telemarketers, is unwanted and inappropriate contact that most agree should be stopped. At Java Today we are puzzling over what to do about comments that aren't offensive so much as they are inappropriate.

John Mitchell recently wrote a blog entry titled Sitting With The Audience. The main point was that folks putting on developer conferences should mingle with attendees more. The first two talkback items were responsive and then the third began with an introduction and continued:

I am interested in getting the good Knowledge of JSP/Servlet , can anybody help me how shd i go about it...i mean what is the best way ...

The poster did have the good manners to identify themself. The post itself isn't offensive. On the other hand, it has nothing to do with the thread to which it is posted. John indicated as much in a polite and restrained response to the poster. If this were posted to a wiki page, the page would have been refactored by some reader with the non-relevant post removed. But when should a comment posted to a talkback be removed?

I've included a link to Dave Hyatt's Surfin Safari blog in today's "Also Today" stories that explains why he has removed comments from his blog. Although his details are different, here's his take on irrelevant posts.

In the real world this would be clearly impolite, somewhat akin to interrupting someone in the middle of a conversation in order to babble about a completely different subject, so what makes you think it's any less rude to do it in my blog comments?

That makes total sense. Imagine several of us talking about conference organizers and sponsors hanging out more with the attendees. Suddenly someone blurts out "how do I learn more about JSPs and Servlets?" What would be the appropriate response?

Today, I'll open up the comments for this blog entry. Let me know how you think we should handle irrelevant posts.

In Also Today, Tim O'Reilly recently blogged about a set of guidelines for web aware applications in the spirit of the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. In "Guidelines for Network Aware Software" O'Reilly asserts that more applications should be network aware and that they should be some set of guidelines to make sure we're all on the same page. You can also find Dave Hyatt's comments on inappropriate behavior in "Disabling Commints in Blogs."

Steve Mallett, the Java Today news editor has gathered the following Java Today News Headlines: "JBoss 4 DR2 Released with expanded AOP, JDO, JMS Features" ,"Java Gui Builder 0.6.5a released", "Crackers organize vandalism contest", "Get the Latest Version of Jameleon", and "Morphon XML-Editor now free of charge".

Once this page is no longer featured as the front page of Java Today it will be archived at http://today.java.net/today/archive/index_07042003.html. You can access other past issues by changing the address appropriately.

Comments

• Polite Nukage
  I think such inappropriate messages should be nuked with a reasonably polite note to the offending party that they should learn about good 'netiquette. I.e., I think we need to add a "How to be a good community member" page. [No, the "Terms of Participation" are merely legal coverage and have more or less nothing to do with the community.]

  Posted by: johnm on July 04, 2003 at 08:09 AM

• Slashdot!
  I'm sure this is the first thing that came to mind to most, but Slashdot has this down pat. Let the community moderate! Of course, I'm not saying to go exactly like /. does it, as it would probably be a bit overkill in this case, but a slimmed down version could be very benificial.

  Posted by: ensonik on July 04, 2003 at 09:57 AM

• 'A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy' paper
  Daniel,

  Clay Shirky has recently posted the following paper that discusses the fundamental principles involved with inappropriate group member behavior:

  http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

  The paper also talks about various methods that have proven successful for managing this bad behavior.

  It is a bit of a long read but I think that you will find it worth while.

  Ted Kosan
  embedlets.org

  Posted by: tkosan on July 04, 2003 at 11:15 PM

• Bayesian files-Mozz
  Have you ever heard of using Mozilla's email client in Mozilla 1.4 and junk filters..your spouse would no longer have to delete invidual email messages its done auomatically once you train the filter mechanism..

  Posted by: shareme on July 05, 2003 at 07:04 AM

• -1 Informative
  Obviously, the person asking for help learning about JSP wasn't familiar with the blog commenting system, thinking it was an appropriate place to look for tutorials. As Dave Hyatt rightly pointed out, if someone did this in real life, we would silence that person and remove any record of their existence, 1984-style... oh no wait... my mistake... we would ask them nicely to stop and make them aware of our expectations.

  I suggest giving bloggers the ability to mark posts as irrelevant but not to delete them. Someone browsing will see maybe the subject and author, and a note indicating its been marked as irrelevant. The curious can click on the post to view its contents and any replies, and if it happens that the blogger was trying to stifle dissent, it will be obvious and we can all have a good laugh about the egg on his face.

  Although I'm glad this problem is being discussed, I haven't really noticed a flood of penis extension devices and graphic pictures of squirrels being posted all over java.net. You left out that David Hyatt was being inundated with bug requests in spite of "repeated insistent attempts to explain that my blog is not a bug database" - something that was happening, and was likely to continue to plague his blog. A few inappropriate comments here and there is not a cause for concern, and I wonder why this problem is being over-exaggerated.

  Posted by: altovideo on July 07, 2003 at 02:52 AM

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