[Haskell-cafe] Haskellers.com recent changes (and I need some volunteers)
Michael Snoyman
Haskellers became popular a lot faster than I'd anticipated. This has
prompted me to need to make some changes that I was only planning on
implementing later on. As usual, all points are up for discussion
(this is intended to be a community-run site after all).
* Pagination on homepage. We now see only 10 users at a time.
* The sort order is different. Now, "real haskellers" (we'll discuss
that in a second) come first, sorted by years of experience with
Haskell and then alphabetically by full name.
* We now have site admins. Currently, I'm the only one, but I would
like to add some more (thus the need for volunteers). Admins currently
have four rights/duties:
* Grant/revoke "real haskeller" status. This status currently only
affects sort order on home page, but might be used for more in the
future.
* Grant/revoke admin rights.
* Block/unblock a user. A blocked user will not show up on the
homepage, not be counted for public/private/unverified accounts, and
will have a big nasty "blocked" warning on their user page.
* Read/close admin messages. These can be created by the following features:
* Users can request "real haskeller" status in their Edit Profile > Extras tab.
* Users can request their account to be unblocked.
* Anyone (logged in or not) can flag a user on their user page.
You'll notice that admins are not able to make any changes to user
data. Anyone who is interested in taking on this responsibility should
email me about it. I think five people should easily be able to handle
this, I'm not anticipating a high load. Then again, I didn't
anticipate over 200 accounts created in a week either.
Oh, and *please* don't email me personally to request a "real
Haskeller" status. If you use the button on the site, it makes it much
easier to add the status. Also, don't take it personally if an admin
denies your "real haskeller" request; it's currently a very poorly
defined notion, and I don't even know who the admins are going to be.
Michael
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David Virebayre
Hi,
> Haskellers became popular a lot faster than I'd anticipated. This has
I've noticed a new 'flag this user' on my profile, but it's not clear
(at least to me) what this does. Out of curiosity, I clicked on it,
got a uninformative (again, to me) message "A flag message has been
sent to the admins. Thanks!"
> easier to add the status. Also, don't take it personally if an admin
> denies your "real haskeller" request; it's currently a very poorly
> defined notion, and I don't even know who the admins are going to be.
I don't like this notion, or at least how it's called. What is
supposed to be a real haskeller ? For example, I do use haskell for
small things, try to advocate it around me as much as I can, but at
the same time I never contributed to a project, or released a package.
I don't think I'm worthy of a special status, so I wouldn't ask for
"real haskeller" status. At the same time, I don't feel like a fake
Haskeller either.
David.
Tim Matthews
Brandon S Allbery KF8NH
Hash: SHA1
On 10/10/10 21:22 , Tim Matthews wrote:
> seems crazy. I don't know how that works and whether having that status
> absent means a haskeller is 'fake'/'imaginary' etc but I can't see how
> anyone would like to be labeled '¬real' or 'not real'.
I'll counter that by noting that, with my record of answering questions on
- -cafe, it's probably best not to suggest me as someone to look to for useful
experience.... (That is, I'm understanding it to mean "a potential mentor")
- --
brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl] all...@kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] all...@ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH
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Michael Snoyman
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).
This also explains why Lennart and Simon PJ are not at spots 1 and 2:
I haven't granted them real Haskeller status. Obviously no offense is
intended, I just haven't have a chance yet. As is, I've accepted
(virtually) every request for real Haskeller status: the only
exception so far has been people who haven't set their full name
properly (which once again is my fault for creating a slightly
confusing UI).
Then the question remains how to we sort people. One idea is randomly;
the downside is that it will be difficult to just start browsing the
way you can today. We could show newest Haskellers first, which I
think definitely has a benefit. I would still recommend we use the
real Haskeller status for this, and count people as "new" based on
when they receive that status. This will give everyone a chance to
make the rounds.
And of course, the main feature that's lacking right now is a
search/filter for users. I want to wait a few more days to see if we
add any more features that should be accounted for in the search.
This default sorting issue seems contentious enough that it might be
worth doing a poll on it. If you have concrete ideas of how the
algorithm should work, please send them over. Make sure to specify
whether you think the real Haskeller thing should be kept, and a
better name for it if you can think of one.
Michael
On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 3:53 AM, Lennart Augustsson
<lennart.a...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The list is clearly not sorted by years of experience. I and Simon PJ
> are on the second page, and I doubt many people wrote Haskell programs
> before us.
>
> -- Lennart (iPhone)
Mark Lentczner
> I'm worried about spam accounts being featured on
> the homepage. Real Haskeller is not meant to be exclusive, it's a
> minimal level of oversight by the admins.
A more common approach to the problem of spam accounts -- which is very real -- is to not allow accounts to appear before they have been vetted by an admin. Allowing accounts to appear on the site as they are created will, sooner or later, result in the site being over run with spam faster than you can keep up.
For the community site I help run (http://www.contextfreeart.org/) had this problem a while back and we switched to all accounts being vetted. We use http://www.stopforumspam.com/ as source of information to easily help us make that determination.
- Mark
Michael Snoyman
> On Oct 10, 2010, at 10:56 AM, Michael Snoyman wrote:
>> I'm worried about spam accounts being featured on
>> the homepage. Real Haskeller is not meant to be exclusive, it's a
>> minimal level of oversight by the admins.
>
> A more common approach to the problem of spam accounts -- which is very real -- is to not allow accounts to appear before they have been vetted by an admin. Allowing accounts to appear on the site as they are created will, sooner or later, result in the site being over run with spam faster than you can keep up.
>
> For the community site I help run (http://www.contextfreeart.org/) had this problem a while back and we switched to all accounts being vetted. We use http://www.stopforumspam.com/ as source of information to easily help us make that determination.
That may very well be the direction we need to take it. For the
moment, since spam has *not* been a problem yet, I've erred on the
side of being too liberal. But if necessary, I can convert the "real
Haskeller" status to indicate whether an account is shown at all or
not.
However, this may never be necessary: I'm not sure how much it bothers
me that a spam account could appear at the very bottom of the search
listings. And the feeling on this list seems to be for *less* admin
control, not more. But as I said, all options such as this are in
reserve.
Michael
Nicolas Pouillard
I think that "Verified accounts" sounds more appropriate than "Real
Haskellers", then.
Regards,
--
Nicolas Pouillard
http://nicolaspouillard.fr
Michael Snoyman
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
Magnus Therning
[...]
> 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?
I'd be weary of making that a requirement, there are good reasons for
not putting your picture on the web, just like there are good reasons
to not use your real name :-)
/M
--
Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus＠therning．org Jabber: magnus＠therning．org
http://therning.org/magnus identi.ca|twitter: magthe
Roman Cheplyaka
wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 08:37, Michael Snoyman <mic...@snoyman.com>
wrote:
> [...]
>> 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?
>
> I'd be weary of making that a requirement, there are good reasons for
> not putting your picture on the web, just like there are good reasons
> to not use your real name :-)
... just like there are good reasons not to publish yourself in a public
catalogue (such as haskellers.com) at all.
I have nothing against anonymity. I voted against requirement of real names
on hackage.
But in this particular case, the whole point to be in the listing is to
present yourself. So I find the above proposal very reasonable.
--
Roman I. Cheplyaka :: http://ro-che.info/
"Don't let school get in the way of your education." - Mark Twain
Vo Minh Thu
> On Mon, 11 Oct 2010 11:54:12 +0100, Magnus Therning <mag...@therning.org>
> wrote:
>> On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 08:37, Michael Snoyman <mic...@snoyman.com>
> wrote:
>> [...]
>>> 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?
>>
>> I'd be weary of making that a requirement, there are good reasons for
>> not putting your picture on the web, just like there are good reasons
>> to not use your real name :-)
>
> ... just like there are good reasons not to publish yourself in a public
> catalogue (such as haskellers.com) at all.
>
> I have nothing against anonymity. I voted against requirement of real names
> on hackage.
>
> But in this particular case, the whole point to be in the listing is to
> present yourself. So I find the above proposal very reasonable.
Hi,
In the belgian law, an employer can (of course) request a faithful
resume, but cannot request the resume to contain a picture of you.
This is a clear example where you wish to advertise yourself, but not
necessarily with a picture. Anyway, I don't think it is difficult to
imagine situations where one doesn't wish to show a picture of his/her
face.
Cheers,
Thu
Roman Cheplyaka
Agree. But then there should be no picture at all for a given person.
As Michael said -- no cartoons, no identicons.
--
Roman I. Cheplyaka :: http://ro-che.info/
"Don't let school get in the way of your education." - Mark Twain
John Lato
From: Michael Snoyman <mic...@snoyman.com>
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?
Roman Cheplyaka
This is Gravatar's issue, which has little to do with OpenID, as far as I
understand.
Magnus Therning
I think it would be wrong to have haskellers.com impose restrictions
on what image I put on gravatar. My image on gravatar pops up in
numerous other sites (I believe stackoverflow, ohloh, flickr, etc) and
I'm not necessarily happy with putting my photo everywhere, even
though I'd be fine with putting it on haskellers.com.
So, instead I'd like to see the use of gravatar become optional. Then
if haskellers.org could require a photo, and I could simply choose not
to get my cartoon image from gravatar.
An obvious extension would be to allow me to get the image from other
sources in the future, maybe an option to grab a picture out of an
album on Facebook, or Flickr?
/M
--
Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus＠therning．org Jabber: magnus＠therning．org
http://therning.org/magnus identi.ca|twitter: magthe
Michael Snoyman
So firstly, just to clarify, I was never recommending we make real
photos a requirement to have an account on Haskellers. I was simply
talking about the 10 random profiles that get shown on the homepage: I
think it gives a more professional feel to the site if we see 10 "real
people" and not Bart Simpson. That was my question.
Now, the idea of using something besides gravatar is a fair point. I
know personally I *like* it when sites use gravatar, as it's one less
site I have to upload my image to. Otherwise, I need to search around
for my preferred profile image, crop it to whatever that site wants,
hope they'll scale it nicely, etc. From the site maintainer
standpoint, gravatar also means there's less moving parts on
Haskellers, and it decreases our bandwidth significantly, which is
definitely something to consider.
I'll definitely put some thought into providing an alternative to
gravatar. In the meanwhile, an option you have is to add a second
gravatar email address. This works especially well with Gmail
accounts, where you can just use a + sign (eg,
michael+h...@snoyman.com). I'm not saying this is ideal, but if
you want to have your real photo up, it will work today.
Michael
Brandon S Allbery KF8NH
Hash: SHA1
On 10/11/10 03:37 , Michael Snoyman wrote:
> "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?
I think you need to decide which community you intend to support, actually.
On the one hand, a professional organization will prefer to have real names,
real pictures, etc. On the other, if you want to be a central coordinating
spot for the existing Haskell community, many of us are far better known by
nicknames and identicons.
If you want to support both, then perhaps you need multiple "portals", with
people wanting to be identified professionally registering appropriately in
order to show up in the professional portal. But then you have the
difficulty of how to show content in each portal (for example, a forum
discussion might be cited in the professional forum, but what if some or all
of the contributors were on the community side? You might show names and
pictures from the professional side and some kind of placeholder for those
not registered professionally, but then you need to worry about the folks
who want to keep their professional and "online" identities separate.
- --
brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl] all...@kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] all...@ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH
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John Lato
Now, the idea of using something besides gravatar is a fair point. I
know personally I *like* it when sites use gravatar, as it's one less
site I have to upload my image to. Otherwise, I need to search around
for my preferred profile image, crop it to whatever that site wants,
hope they'll scale it nicely, etc. From the site maintainer
standpoint, gravatar also means there's less moving parts on
Haskellers, and it decreases our bandwidth significantly, which is
definitely something to consider.
I'll definitely put some thought into providing an alternative to
gravatar. In the meanwhile, an option you have is to add a second
gravatar email address. This works especially well with Gmail
accounts, where you can just use a + sign (eg,
michael+h...@snoyman.com). I'm not saying this is ideal, but if
you want to have your real photo up, it will work today.
Ben Franksen
Why not? They can say more about a person than a picture (not some generic,
auto-chosen one, of course).
Cheers
Ben
Jeremy Shaw
<all...@ece.cmu.edu> wrote:
>
> On the one hand, a professional organization will prefer to have real names,
> real pictures, etc. On the other, if you want to be a central coordinating
> spot for the existing Haskell community, many of us are far better known by
> nicknames and identicons.
I would definitely like to see the option of adding your handle to
your profile. Even if it is a commercially oriented site. Otherwise I
won't be able to figure out who is who.
- jeremy
Michael Snoyman
> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 8:03 AM, Brandon S Allbery KF8NH
> <all...@ece.cmu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> On the one hand, a professional organization will prefer to have real names,
>> real pictures, etc. On the other, if you want to be a central coordinating
>> spot for the existing Haskell community, many of us are far better known by
>> nicknames and identicons.
>
> I would definitely like to see the option of adding your handle to
> your profile. Even if it is a commercially oriented site. Otherwise I
> won't be able to figure out who is who.
It's available now. Just go to extras.
As a side point, I'm wondering how I should let everyone know about
the new features on the site. Emailing the cafe each time would be
stupid (and spam); posting to my twitter or my blog won't hit the
whole audience. The two real options I see are:
* A Haskelers twitter account
* A news section on the site
I lean towards the second. Obviously, I'd include a news feed with it.
Michael
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
>
> As a side point, I'm wondering how I should let everyone know about
> the new features on the site. Emailing the cafe each time would be
> stupid (and spam); posting to my twitter or my blog won't hit the
> whole audience. The two real options I see are:
>
> * A Haskelers twitter account
> * A news section on the site
>
> I lean towards the second. Obviously, I'd include a news feed with it.
I'd prefer the latter, possibly even with a dedicated optional
"announce" mailing list.
--
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Mi...@gmail.com
IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com
Conrad Parker
> As a side point, I'm wondering how I should let everyone know about
> the new features on the site. Emailing the cafe each time would be
> stupid (and spam);
but it's the main reason people are checking it out :) I reckon it's
ok to talk about community stuff in the community cafe!
> posting to my twitter or my blog won't hit the
> whole audience. The two real options I see are:
>
> * A Haskelers twitter account
> * A news section on the site
>
> I lean towards the second. Obviously, I'd include a news feed with it.
and please make sure it hits the haskell reddit ;-)
cheers,
Conrad.
Jason Dagit
On 14 October 2010 14:00, Michael Snoyman <mic...@snoyman.com> wrote:but it's the main reason people are checking it out :) I reckon it's
> As a side point, I'm wondering how I should let everyone know about
> the new features on the site. Emailing the cafe each time would be
> stupid (and spam);
ok to talk about community stuff in the community cafe!
Bas van Dijk
>> I would definitely like to see the option of adding your handle to
>> your profile. Even if it is a commercially oriented site. Otherwise I
>> won't be able to figure out who is who.
>
> It's available now. Just go to extras.
Small point: you might also want to update the "I'm a Haskeller"
button to point to the username instead of the user id.
Bas
Michael Snoyman
> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 7:00 AM, Michael Snoyman <mic...@snoyman.com> wrote:
>>> I would definitely like to see the option of adding your handle to
>>> your profile. Even if it is a commercially oriented site. Otherwise I
>>> won't be able to figure out who is who.
>>
>> It's available now. Just go to extras.
>
> Small point: you might also want to update the "I'm a Haskeller"
> button to point to the username instead of the user id.
I actually specifically *didn't* do that: users have the option in the
future of changing their usernames, while the user id will stay the
same. The user id version always redirects to the username version.
It's arguable whether this is something to really be concerned about,
however. Anyone who wants to can modify their HTML.
Michael
Bas van Dijk
> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 10:56 AM, Bas van Dijk <v.dij...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 7:00 AM, Michael Snoyman <mic...@snoyman.com> wrote:
>>>> I would definitely like to see the option of adding your handle to
>>>> your profile. Even if it is a commercially oriented site. Otherwise I
>>>> won't be able to figure out who is who.
>>>
>>> It's available now. Just go to extras.
>>
>> Small point: you might also want to update the "I'm a Haskeller"
>> button to point to the username instead of the user id.
>
> I actually specifically *didn't* do that: users have the option in the
> future of changing their usernames, while the user id will stay the
> same. The user id version always redirects to the username version.
> It's arguable whether this is something to really be concerned about,
> however. Anyone who wants to can modify their HTML.
That makes sense.
Another thing. I see you added a news section to the site:
http://www.haskellers.com/news/
Great! Is there also a RSS feed?
Thanks,
Bas
Michael Snoyman
> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 11:00 AM, Michael Snoyman <mic...@snoyman.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 10:56 AM, Bas van Dijk <v.dij...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 7:00 AM, Michael Snoyman <mic...@snoyman.com> wrote:
>>>>> I would definitely like to see the option of adding your handle to
>>>>> your profile. Even if it is a commercially oriented site. Otherwise I
>>>>> won't be able to figure out who is who.
>>>>
>>>> It's available now. Just go to extras.
>>>
>>> Small point: you might also want to update the "I'm a Haskeller"
>>> button to point to the username instead of the user id.
>>
>> I actually specifically *didn't* do that: users have the option in the
>> future of changing their usernames, while the user id will stay the
>> same. The user id version always redirects to the username version.
>> It's arguable whether this is something to really be concerned about,
>> however. Anyone who wants to can modify their HTML.
>
> That makes sense.
>
> Another thing. I see you added a news section to the site:
>
> http://www.haskellers.com/news/
>
> Great! Is there also a RSS feed?
Yes, http://www.haskellers.com/feed/news/. Is it useful to people to
put up a feedburner subscribe button?
Michael
Henning Thielemann
> As a side point, I'm wondering how I should let everyone know about
> the new features on the site. Emailing the cafe each time would be
> stupid (and spam); posting to my twitter or my blog won't hit the
> whole audience.
Regarding the news comments by Disqus on haskellers.com: Why do they
require JavaScript?
Bas van Dijk
>> Great! Is there also a RSS feed?
>
> Yes, http://www.haskellers.com/feed/news/. Is it useful to people to
> put up a feedburner subscribe button?
Thanks, I now see that Firefox provides a nice "Subscribe to this
page" button in the address bar. Chromium unfortunately doesn't,
that's why I didn't notice it.
Bas
Michael Snoyman
> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 11:06 AM, Michael Snoyman <mic...@snoyman.com> wrote:
>>> Great! Is there also a RSS feed?
>>
>> Yes, http://www.haskellers.com/feed/news/. Is it useful to people to
>> put up a feedburner subscribe button?
>
> Thanks, I now see that Firefox provides a nice "Subscribe to this
> page" button in the address bar. Chromium unfortunately doesn't,
> that's why I didn't notice it.
I think that's my biggest annoyance with Chromium. I've added a
Feedburner icon, as well as a Reddit button.
Michael
Michael Snoyman
<schle...@henning-thielemann.de> wrote:
> Michael Snoyman schrieb:
>
>> As a side point, I'm wondering how I should let everyone know about
>> the new features on the site. Emailing the cafe each time would be
>> stupid (and spam); posting to my twitter or my blog won't hit the
>> whole audience.
>
> Regarding the news comments by Disqus on haskellers.com: Why do they
> require JavaScript?
That's the way Disqus rolls ;). If I'm not mistaken, I think they have
the ability to post comments on their site without Javascript, but I
could be mistaken.
Adding a custom Haskellers comment system is a possibility. Here are
my thoughts:
Pros
* Can have more graceful degradation.
* Use your Haskellers account for posting comments (big plus here).
* Comments would probably load faster.
Cons
* Takes more time.
* Will never have all the features that Disqus has (Reddit reactions,
for instance).
* Might make it more difficult for people without Haskellers accounts
to comment (I don't think I care about this).
Michael