Suggestions about improvements of the forum

Thanks for your feedback. First, to clarify, I don't mean these suggestions to be a substitute for moderation. Improper behavior made in bad faith will require moderator intervention. My goal is to have a forum interface that makes it easy and obvious to do the right thing, so that fewer mistakes are made in good faith and it is easier to spot and deal with actual trolls.

> # The up/down voting system

My hope is that a "flag as inappropriate" vs "not inappropriate" would be more useful and less prone to abuse than "+" vs "-", because flags would have to be justified by identifying which community guidelines have been broken. Good faith actors who start to improperly flag a comment might change their mind when they are forced to stop and think about whether a particular community guideline has actually been broken. Bad faith actors may continue, selecting a community guideline which has not actually been broken, but since they had to give a reason, other users and the moderator can evaluate and contest the reason given. Reputation should not enter into it, since other users would not see who flagged the comment (although the system should keep track of this to detect serial abusers).

Perhaps you're right that this is naive and the moderator should handle everything. In this case, I think we should get rid of the voting system entirely. In its current form it invites improper use. "+" vs "-" suggests that you *should* use the voting system to express agreement/disagreement, so if it's not desirable for users to act that way then we should fix or get rid of the mechanism that invites them to do so. Perhaps another solution could be for "flag as inappropriate" to simply send an alert to the moderator, to help draw the moderator's attention to potential problems without actually allowing users to bypass the moderator.

> # Staying on topic

> It is OK to have a branch resulting from the trunk discussion but there must be a system to easily have that branch moved into another thread (to keep the original one cleaner). The two can link to each other at the point of splitting and at the beginning of the branch. Then anyone can keep following the line which interests him.

This is exactly what I'm suggesting. If we want users to make new threads for new topics and link the two together, the system should make it easy to do so and make this feature highly discoverable. It should be more convenient and obvious to do the right thing (start and link to/from a new thread) than the wrong thing (continue the discussion in the current thread).

> # The discrepancy of forum and mailing lists:

> There should be only one system, not 2 systems.

I think it is valuable to have both an email and web interface to the forum. Casual users generally prefer a forum, but as someone who spends a lot of time providing support in Trisquel Users, it is very helpful to be able to use my preferred email client. I would probably spend less than half as much time providing support if I had to use the forum.

However,

> It is still possible to have a system in which one can reply by email. On GitHub for example one can reply by email to a thread and the reply goes public. The other members don't see the personal email address of the member which makes it impossible for 3rd parties to collect manually or crawl that data.

I would be fine with this solution, as long as you could do by email everything important that can be done from the forum, including starting a new thread branching off from an old one.

I think this sort of subject don't belong in the "General Free Software", I think this sort of subject would be more fitting to the "Trisquel".

> The recent mass downvoting of my posts in various threads which are all on-topic and don't violate any rules is an example of how this system is abused by someone who thinks he may act against another in a stupid sneaky way.

It appears to be two people. I don't know who the second person is, but I suspect that the first would not have done it if the voting system replaced downvoting with "flag as inappropriate." There isn't any rule or warning against downvoting a comment because a user dislikes it, which is a problem, but not a moderation problem. If we were to change the system to discourage downvoting for that reason, I think that would be the point where moderation is necessary to deal with the people who continue to do it anyway.

> This is supposed to be a community of people caring about freedom of speech and ethics. However in practice it is a place where a lot of bigotry, desire for domination and off-topic aggression is easily ventilated. The only thing that can change this is moderation. But it doesn't seem that anyone cares, so there is the result.

There are certainly problems, some caused by what I think are honest miscommunications and a lack of consensus as to what is the proper etiquette for the forum, and a few caused intentionally. I see the problems you see and understand your frustration, but I hope it doesn't sour you against the whole community. Your thoughtful and detailed posts about computer security (an issue adjacent but germane to software freedom and something many of us care about) are appreciated by me and I'm sure others. I hope that your negative experiences with some users do not deter you from continuing to contribute.

@ David

If you agree that the voting system causes some problems and aggravates many others, I strongly suggest either removing it, or defining and enforcing a less destructive use for it.

Thanks David. My technical suggestions were meant to be things to keep in mind for the redesign. I didn't expect them to be implemented now. In the meantime, I think that the problem could be mitigated by a post from you clarifying some things:

> Yes, the voting system is indeed problematic, but it has sometimes been useful (and necessary) according to its initial purpose.

Can you explain what the initial purpose was? I don't think that it is clear to the community how the voting system *should* be used, so a downvote might mean different things to different users, resulting in miscommunication. Some guidance from you might be helpful.

It seems that 1-2 people are downvoting almost all of Zigote's comments, as opposed to individual comments they might have a problem with. This is not the first time I've seen this happen to a user, and to me it comes across as a direct attack on the user, needlessly exacerbating conflict. If this is not the intended outcome of the voting system, some clarification might be helpful for everyone.

I have 3 Suggestions for improvements:

1) Markdown: Creating a new thread, commenting/replying to a thread. Can we use (simple) Markdown.

2) Rich Content: This one is also related to the first suggestion.
Allow email/code-blocks/images/urls, so when posting piece of code, it's easier to read and we can also our public emails in our signature?
Don't allow bold/italic/h1-6/..., some people can use it to make some statements, and this can be annoying to read sometimes(eg. a post using only h1 tags and setting some words in bold)

3) Api: Maybe create an json formatted api, for some who want's to create their own version of the forum, or create wrappers around it? So if Trisquel Dev didn't implemented mobile version, someone else can host his own version, with same content(forum threads)?
- Api URL: https://trisquel.info/api
- get latest 10 threads: GET /forum/general-free-software-talk
- get current thread: GET /forum/suggestions-about-improvements-forum
- post a comment: POST /forum/suggestions-about-improvements-forum BODY {"content":"simple markdown [with](urls) and `code blocks`"}
- post a reply: POST /comment/reply/12345/678901 BODY {"content":"simple markdown [with](urls) and `code blocks`"}

Personal policy (until I see any change):

I will reply with an "Off-topic" post to each new off-topic message which I see in threads opened by me. Surely that won't flood the forum more than the actual off-topic stuff + it will be clearer than the meaningless "-".

I just want to mention that the new text which shows up:

"Please use the rating system to mark posts that go against the Community Guidelines"

is just a way to perpetuate the lack of moderation. "Please do this" does not mean anyone will do it. This voting system is completely ineffective and useless. +10 or -10 - who cares?

Zigote, I appreciate your passion for order and your desire to see the forums become more readable and more useful. I share this desire, as I'm sure do all the regular contributors to this community. That said, it's one thing to say that there ought to be a moderation team. It's another thing to identify the people who will actually volunteer the hours of work that effective moderation requires.

One of the first online communities I was involved with was the Indymedia site I helped to start. Even with a relatively large group of 'clerks' moderating our open-publishing newswire, it took hours of each person's volunteer labour every week. As they always do, complicated edge cases would come up that the clerks couldn't agree on how to handle. As the project went on, users outside the clerks group who disagreed with our moderation decisions started giving us grief about it, in some cases very abusively. These added fuel to the fire, and it sometimes got to the point where the mailing list where we had our moderation discussions started to need moderators ;) The rancour of these disagreements on where the draw the line between free expression and abuse or discrimination, and what was and wasn't on topic, and so on, eventually drove most of the original volunteers away and effectively scuttled the project.

So I think the approach we use here is much healthier. My understanding is if a user engages in unambiguous abuse of the forum, flooding with gibberish, death threats, pron links etc, the moderators step in to remove their posting rights. For the edge cases, or occasional misbehaviours or losses of temper by folks who are usually constructive, we all take a role in moderation. We share the workload of making nuisance postings disappear (for users with JS), and we share responsibility for making this a pleasant technical watering hole, so the moderators don't become the target of everyone's frustrations.

There are two changes I would suggest:
1) I don't know if it's wise for users get a say in moderation just for setting up an account, including those who might be doing so with the intention of being disruptive. It might be better if there was a probation period. I suggest that users who are subscribed to the mailing lists ought to get the rating buttons for their forum user accounts, along with users who have been posting regular for a certain amount of time, or a certain number of posts, without being kicked off as trolls. Before the buttons appear for a user who has completed probation, or joined a mailing list, they ought to get an auto-mail explaining in some detail how they are meant to be used.

2) This is probably more a note for the redesign. I think it would be better if red-labeled comments disappeared for all users, not just those using JS. The way Indymedia handled this was to move moderated comments to their own page, with its own URL, leaving only a link to that URL on the page where it originally appeared. The Indymedia CMS allowed this to be reversed, if an appeal on that moderation decisions succeeded, restoring the comment to its original location. I still think this is a good approach. Once a thread is locked, the same process that locks it could delete any remaining red-labeled comments from the database and remove the URLs from the thread page.

I agree with users who propose that original posters (or at least moderators) should be able to sticky an important or informative thread, because the forum in its present state looks rather messy and inconvenient without a sticky feature.
(By the way, notice how we discuss forum improvements in the General Free Software Talk sub-forum - shouldn't it be in "Trisquel users" instead? Any moderation as regards off-topic threads is absent here, isn't it. This also contributes to a larger mess.)

This site has not moved a millimeter in direction to improvement. I keep seeing things like (random recent examples):

- A topic about Invidious but when I click last post I read a discussion about Replicant and phones.

- A topic about phones - last post discussing libreboot on laptops.

And what is even worse - the site continues to operate in an illegal way (anti GDPR) even though I have spent (or rather - wasted) my time to explain that this needs urgent attention:

https://trisquel.info/en/issues/26008

It is ironic to see people discuss the search for ultimate privacy and freedom on a platform which doesn't even respect the basic and mandatory regulations about personal data protection.

Doh.