Why is that? Is the host of our discussion lists perhaps automatically
banning certain words, even if people confirm that everything is OK?
Note that banned words can seem quite innocent. For example, consider
the German translation of the word "please": The German word is
spelled in exactly the same way as a rather rude French word -- and
therefore German-speaking yahoo forums do not allow to say "please" in
German!
At http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/a080d3... it was suggested to use gmane for reading and posting the Sage
discussion lists. But that is not enough, IMHO. I believe that such
extremely stupid automatic moderation can not be tolerated. So, what
about looking for a different host of our lists? There are too many
sage-related lists anyway...
I am not sure whether the topic is really to be considered sage-flame.
Personally, I think dysfunctional discussion groups are bad for
development, and thus the topic belongs to sage-devel. but "dropping
google" is perhaps a bit too controversial for sage-devel - who
knows?
> Why is that? Is the host of our discussion lists perhaps automatically > banning certain words, even if people confirm that everything is OK?
> Note that banned words can seem quite innocent. For example, consider > the German translation of the word "please": The German word is > spelled in exactly the same way as a rather rude French word -- and > therefore German-speaking yahoo forums do not allow to say "please" in > German!
> At http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/a080d3... > it was suggested to use gmane for reading and posting the Sage > discussion lists. But that is not enough, IMHO. I believe that such > extremely stupid automatic moderation can not be tolerated. So, what > about looking for a different host of our lists? There are too many > sage-related lists anyway...
> I am not sure whether the topic is really to be considered sage-flame.
Your tone above makes it a reasonable post for sage-flame :-)
> Personally, I think dysfunctional discussion groups are bad for > development, and thus the topic belongs to sage-devel. but "dropping > google" is perhaps a bit too controversial for sage-devel - who > knows?
> Cheers, > Simon
> -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-flame" group. > To post to this group, send email to sage-flame@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-flame+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-flame?hl=en.
-- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org
It's very important to understand how these automatic moderation tools work and how serious they are. For a start, the idea that you can know why the message is marked as spam is naive. It would defeat the whole utility of them if you could simply know why your post failed the moderation test.
I should think there'll very likely be a flag added to your email account to be stored with various organisations that control such things. They are of course not public institutions. But they clearly operate in the interest of the public.
Oh, to be sure, occasionally mail that is not spam is marked as spam, and who am I to say that your post was actually spam. That's not for me to judge, but for others.
You can of course appeal the decision of the spam filter, but you'll need an advocate. These cases can be quite involved, and I shouldn't expect an easy outcome. Why, I know a man who five years ago had a post marked as spam, and as yet he hasn't even reached the highest level of arbitration. I should think it could go on for years. I've even heard that these things are hopeless. Though I shouldn't lose hope. Once hope is lost, everything is lost.
Bill.
On 19 March 2012 20:16, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I saw your message, looked, and marked it not spam, and now it is not > hidden. I think because I own the group, this worked.
>> Why is that? Is the host of our discussion lists perhaps automatically >> banning certain words, even if people confirm that everything is OK?
>> Note that banned words can seem quite innocent. For example, consider >> the German translation of the word "please": The German word is >> spelled in exactly the same way as a rather rude French word -- and >> therefore German-speaking yahoo forums do not allow to say "please" in >> German!
>> At http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel/browse_thread/thread/a080d3... >> it was suggested to use gmane for reading and posting the Sage >> discussion lists. But that is not enough, IMHO. I believe that such >> extremely stupid automatic moderation can not be tolerated. So, what >> about looking for a different host of our lists? There are too many >> sage-related lists anyway...
>> I am not sure whether the topic is really to be considered sage-flame.
> Your tone above makes it a reasonable post for sage-flame :-)
>> Personally, I think dysfunctional discussion groups are bad for >> development, and thus the topic belongs to sage-devel. but "dropping >> google" is perhaps a bit too controversial for sage-devel - who >> knows?
>> Cheers, >> Simon
>> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-flame" group. >> To post to this group, send email to sage-flame@googlegroups.com. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-flame+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. >> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-flame?hl=en.
> -- > William Stein > Professor of Mathematics > University of Washington > http://wstein.org
> -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-flame" group. > To post to this group, send email to sage-flame@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-flame+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-flame?hl=en.
On Monday, March 19, 2012 8:58:20 PM UTC+1, Simon King wrote:
> Why is that? Is the host of our discussion lists perhaps automatically > banning certain words, even if people confirm that everything is OK?
what you try to imply or infer is not true, but there is an automatic spam protection - probably very similar to gmail's spam filter. but you never ever see those messages, because only we as admins/managers of the group see them in a special page and we can review them before they are posted. this also only happens very very rarely. in this case you are referring to, my only explanation is that someone marked it as spam.
On 19 Mrz., 21:16, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I saw your message, looked, and marked it not spam, and now it is not
> hidden.
For the record: I was not talking about a message of mine, but was
talking about the original message in the thread I cited, which was
from a user called Ravi.
The related thread on sage-devel also had some problems, though. It
was shown that there are 5 messages in the thread, but when one opened
the thread, only two of them were there. So, in contrast to Ravi's
post on sage-support (which could be opened by confirming that one
does want to read a potentially abusive post), three out of five posts
were not available at all. In the meantime, they popped up, though.
On 19 Mrz., 22:03, Harald Schilly <harald.schi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Monday, March 19, 2012 8:58:20 PM UTC+1, Simon King wrote:
> > Why is that? Is the host of our discussion lists perhaps automatically
> > banning certain words, even if people confirm that everything is OK?
> what you try to imply or infer is not true, but there is an automatic spam
> protection - probably very similar to gmail's spam filter.
> but you never ever see those messages
Then we have a different notion of "being marked as spam". What I
meant was: One could see that there was a post (Ravi's question), but
one needed to confirm that one really wants to read it.
> my only explanation is that someone
> marked it as spam.
Reading Ravi's post, I can only guess that that happened unintended.
However: When the post was hidden in the first place, I and others
confirmed that the post was OK; but after a few hours, the post was
hidden AGAIN. In other words, the "accident" happened at least twice
with the same post, which makes me not believe in an accident. Also,
the fact that in the same day in a related thread on sage-devel
several messages were not available at all seems fishy to me.
Anyway. I think concerning changing the platform, one must not forget
the other points: 1) The general look of the new groups is ugly (yes,
one shouldn't argue about taste, and it's painting a bike shed...). 2)
The editor that is part of the new groups is broken -- at least for
me.
On sage-devel, Keshav mentioned that there even is an Emacs mode to
work with Gmane lists - which makes me wonder whether the Sage
notebook could be provided with a way to read and post on the sage-
related lists, with a less broken editor.
On 20 Mrz., 06:48, Simon King <simon.k...@uni-jena.de> wrote:
> On 19 Mrz., 21:16, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I saw your message, looked, and marked it not spam, and now it is not
> > hidden.
> For the record: I was not talking about a message of mine, but was
> talking about the original message in the thread I cited, which was
> from a user called Ravi.
I just saw that the sage-support thread initiated by Ravi is AGAIN
(now for the THIRD TIME at least) hidden. Instead of the thread title,
I read the mesage "Dieses Thema wurde ausgeblendet, weil es als
missbräuchlich gekennzeichnet wurde", which in English means something
like "This topic is hidden, because it was marked as abusive/
improper."
Can the group administrators please find out, *how* it was marked as
abusive? I mean: Was it marked by another user, or was the mark due to
an automatic moderation tool? I think we must not tolerate an
automatic moderation tool doing those decisions - because the
*decision* was abusive, not Ravi's post.
On Tuesday, March 20, 2012 2:11:31 PM UTC+1, Simon King wrote:
> In my office (where I am now), it is Iceweasel 3.5.16.
I don't know it, but i guess it's based on an old firefox, right? I would recommend you to switch to a browser which is actively supported. On linux you don't have much to fear, but this is also a security problem :-\
I doubt it. This is not the beta - the new google groups has now gone live, on sage-devel at least. It's been around in beta for a good four months, and I guess they must think that it's now "good enough". I must admit it was much worse earlier though. All kinds of horrific bugs in the javascript - middle-click pasting would break it, typing newlines would shrink it to a negative height, scrolling displaced the box inside another box causing it to become partially hidden... the list goes on and on. Most of those are fixed now, but there are still issues, not to mention the slight lag caused by javascript watching what you type like a hawk. I really wish you could just disable the rich text editor and use a standard <textarea> which is pretty much guaranteed to work properly on all browsers. I don't even want to send HTML emails in the first place. That and the bugginess are what caused me to decide to move to gmane.
(Simon: see my post on sage-devel about what Gmane is and is not, by the way.)
Iceweasel x.y.z is Firefox x.y.z with branding (i.e. the name, icons, logos, etc.) changed to something that's freely licensed. The default branding has some rights reserved by Mozilla. Iceweasel is produced by Debian. GNU produces something similar called IceCat.
On Tuesday, March 20, 2012 7:46:22 AM UTC-7, Harald Schilly wrote:
> On Tuesday, March 20, 2012 2:11:31 PM UTC+1, Simon King wrote:
>> In my office (where I am now), it is Iceweasel 3.5.16.
> I don't know it, but i guess it's based on an old firefox, right? I would > recommend you to switch to a browser which is actively supported. On linux > you don't have much to fear, but this is also a security problem :-\
On 20 Mrz., 17:51, Keshav Kini <keshav.k...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I doubt it. This is not the beta - the new google groups has now gone live,
> on sage-devel at least. It's been around in beta for a good four months,
> and I guess they must think that it's now "good enough". I must admit it
> was much worse earlier though. All kinds of horrific bugs in the javascript
> - middle-click pasting would break it, typing newlines would shrink it to a
> negative height, scrolling displaced the box inside another box causing it
> to become partially hidden...
This is exactly what I observed, too. And I did observe it on two
different machines, namely my laptop (with Firefox 10.0.2 on openSuse
12.1) and the computer in my office (with the version of Iceweasel I
mentioned).
So, the javascript problems are clearly not solved yet, at least for
me.
> I really wish you could
> just disable the rich text editor and use a standard <textarea> which is
> pretty much guaranteed to work properly on all browsers.
+1!
> I don't even want
> to send HTML emails in the first place. That and the bugginess are what
> caused me to decide to move to gmane.
+2!
> (Simon: see my post on sage-devel about what Gmane is and is not, by the
> way.)
One inconvenience of Gmane: AFAIC, there are only two ways to order
the posts, namely (1) like a blog, so that one does not see the
threads sorted by topic, and (2) by thread, where the threads are
ordered by the time of the *first* post.
Hence, in version (2), an answer to an old thread would not appear on
the first screen and would thus be de facto invisible. But apart from
that, I think Gmane would be good for working.
Or perhaps some of you know whether one can Gmane make to sort the
posts by thread, ordered by the time of the *last* post?
> One inconvenience of Gmane: AFAIC, there are only two ways to order > the posts, namely (1) like a blog, so that one does not see the > threads sorted by topic, and (2) by thread, where the threads are > ordered by the time of the *first* post.
> Hence, in version (2), an answer to an old thread would not appear on > the first screen and would thus be de facto invisible. But apart from > that, I think Gmane would be good for working.
> Or perhaps some of you know whether one can Gmane make to sort the > posts by thread, ordered by the time of the *last* post?
Well, just take some (threaded) news reader of your choice (there are plenty) and use NNTP, which should be faster anyway.
There you can switch between different views, hide threads, and order them by what you want.
Keshav can certainly better recommend some. You can also use Thunderbird for newsgroups (i.e., NNTP).
-leif
-- () The ASCII Ribbon Campaign /\ Help Cure HTML E-Mail
Right, exactly. I would recommend using Gmane through NNTP, which is I guess its main useful feature. The web interfaces are just conveniences, especially for linking people to posts - there isn't really such a thing as an nntp:// link to an individual post since the original specification for newsgroups assumed that articles would expire and disappear after a medium-to-short time (Gmane, as an archival service, does not let its articles expire, of course).
As Gmane was my first exposure to newsgroups, and I happened to be starting to learn Emacs at the time, I decided to dive in and use Gnus, the newsreader mode which comes with Emacs. It's pretty nice, IMO. Though you might not like it if you're not the type to dive into a random Emacs mode and grapple with its weird key bindings for a little while until you internalize them. I haven't used any other newsreaders so I can't recommend anything else either.
> > One inconvenience of Gmane: AFAIC, there are only two ways to order > > the posts, namely (1) like a blog, so that one does not see the > > threads sorted by topic, and (2) by thread, where the threads are > > ordered by the time of the *first* post.
> > Hence, in version (2), an answer to an old thread would not appear on > > the first screen and would thus be de facto invisible. But apart from > > that, I think Gmane would be good for working.
> > Or perhaps some of you know whether one can Gmane make to sort the > > posts by thread, ordered by the time of the *last* post?
> Well, just take some (threaded) news reader of your choice (there are > plenty) and use NNTP, which should be faster anyway.
> There you can switch between different views, hide threads, and order > them by what you want.
> Keshav can certainly better recommend some. You can also use > Thunderbird for newsgroups (i.e., NNTP).
> -leif
> -- > () The ASCII Ribbon Campaign > /\ Help Cure HTML E-Mail
Keshav Kini wrote: > Right, exactly. I would recommend using Gmane through NNTP, which is I > guess its main useful feature. The web interfaces are just conveniences, > especially for linking people to posts - there isn't really such a thing > as an nntp:// link to an individual post since the original > specification for newsgroups assumed that articles would expire and > disappear after a medium-to-short time (Gmane, as an archival service, > does not let its articles expire, of course).
Another disadvantage of NNTP or newsreaders (compared to plain e-mail with IMAP, or a web interface where [or if] you always login) is that the state is local, i.e., the information which articles or posts you've already read etc. is bound to each specific newsreader, and to the machine it is installed on (or the filesystem where your newsreader keeps its files).
So it's a bit inconvenient if you frequently read the same groups from different machines; I don't know whether there are clients between which you could easily synchronize, probably through "the cloud".
You could of course set up your own NNTP server, and e.g. delete already read articles from it...
-leif
-- () The ASCII Ribbon Campaign /\ Help Cure HTML E-Mail
I guess. I generally try to keep up to date and read articles in approximately the order they are posted, so it's not as big a deal to me - if I'm reading from an unfamiliar machine I'll usually just go to google groups and read the top few topics. And I usually only work on one machine anyway. But I see how that could be a problem. Gnus records that stuff in plaintext lisp s-expressions, so you could probably put it under version control and sling it around if you wanted.
On Tuesday, March 20, 2012 4:59:27 PM UTC-7, leif wrote:
> Keshav Kini wrote: > > Right, exactly. I would recommend using Gmane through NNTP, which is I > > guess its main useful feature. The web interfaces are just conveniences, > > especially for linking people to posts - there isn't really such a thing > > as an nntp:// link to an individual post since the original > > specification for newsgroups assumed that articles would expire and > > disappear after a medium-to-short time (Gmane, as an archival service, > > does not let its articles expire, of course).
> Another disadvantage of NNTP or newsreaders (compared to plain e-mail > with IMAP, or a web interface where [or if] you always login) is that > the state is local, i.e., the information which articles or posts you've > already read etc. is bound to each specific newsreader, and to the > machine it is installed on (or the filesystem where your newsreader > keeps its files).
> So it's a bit inconvenient if you frequently read the same groups from > different machines; I don't know whether there are clients between which > you could easily synchronize, probably through "the cloud".
> You could of course set up your own NNTP server, and e.g. delete already > read articles from it...
> -leif
> -- > () The ASCII Ribbon Campaign > /\ Help Cure HTML E-Mail
Harald Schilly wrote: > On Wednesday, March 21, 2012 12:59:27 AM UTC+1, leif wrote:
> I don't know whether there are clients between which > you could easily synchronize, ...
> You can use IMAP, right? filter all mails from a group into a folder, > there you can read and answer them.
Well, we were talking about NNTP, or newsreaders.
You could probably do that with (e.g.) Thunderbird, since it also supports NNTP, but you'd have to (manually?) move articles from your *local* news folder into a (central) folder on the IMAP server.
Don't know how this works if you do that from different clients (i.e., move "new" articles you've already read on another machine into the central folder).
And I wonder if there would remain any advantage of using NNTP instead of e-mail for reading newsgroups.
One could perhaps rsync the newsreader files which record which articles one has already read between different machines (rather than putting them under revision control, as Keshav suggested), but then one of course has to use the same client, and perhaps versions that do not differ much.
All in all not that easy (or convenient) at first glance, but there are probably some experts [elsewhere] around that know better.
-leif
-- () The ASCII Ribbon Campaign /\ Help Cure HTML E-Mail
On Wednesday, March 21, 2012 2:28:29 PM UTC+1, leif wrote:
> Well, we were talking about NNTP, or newsreaders.
since we are on sage-flame, you get a unpolite "i am not" from me for that. the basic problem is that some have a problem with reading the lists here. my suggestion is to a) turn on email sending b) use imap to read and post c) if you don't like the clutter, filter your messages into folders. d) and yes, imap supports the "\Seen" flag, so it syncs read and delete states without having to resort to rsync local files like you suggested *shrug*
Harald Schilly wrote: > On Wednesday, March 21, 2012 2:28:29 PM UTC+1, leif wrote:
> Well, we were talking about NNTP, or newsreaders.
> since we are on sage-flame, you get a unpolite "i am not" from me for > that.
B)
Yes, but you were replying to my thoughts on NEWSGROUPS and NNTP!!!1!11!
> the basic problem is that some have a problem with reading the > lists here. my suggestion is to > a) turn on email sending > b) use imap to read and post
That's rather unrelated to moving sage-devel etc. to some other service. (Ok, that's another, but closely related thread on sage-devel.)
I guess *most* people ("already") use the e-mail interface, preferably using an IMAP account, at least if they happen to read their mails (or the [news]groups / mailing lists) from different Telekommunikationsendger ten (likewise "Rundfunkempfangsger ten", the latter not bothering you until Germany takes over Austria again).
> c) if you don't like the clutter, filter your messages into folders. > d) and yes, imap supports the "\Seen" flag, so it syncs read and delete > states without having to resort to rsync local files like you suggested > *shrug*
:-) One should of course automate that.
And again, I was talking about moving articles of an NNTP folder (which is local) to an IMAP folder (which btw. adds much traffic, depending on how much you move, and thereby destroys the advantages of NNTP, and probably significantly grows your volume on the mail server, although not necessarily more than reading the lists via e-mail anyway).
The latter also of course excludes plain newsreaders from your choice, which is why I suggested using rsync to synchronize different clients' data (i.e., that of the same programs installed on different machines).
-leif
-- () The ASCII Ribbon Campaign /\ Help Cure HTML E-Mail
sage-flame is moderated. Posts which score zero flamage points are duly removed.
I am amazed that my posts about how sage should use git (three years ago) have not been removed since they are now too serious for this forum. Admittedly they were mixed with a large quantity of other delirious comments about python being too slow and the like (we now know this is not true because Guido said so).
On Wednesday, 21 March 2012, leif <not.rea...@online.de> wrote: > Harald Schilly wrote:
>> thread topic mixup alert!!!
> Apparently at least sage-flame doesn't [yet] get censored!
> -leif
> -- > () The ASCII Ribbon Campaign > /\ Help Cure HTML E-Mail
> -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-flame" group. > To post to this group, send email to sage-flame@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
