False rumors

[Journeyman]

There are rumors going around that a spammer is inside the Okopipi
committee, I blieve this to be untrue, it seems to be spammers are
trying to scare the users, however ever IF it where true, there is
little he could do unoticed. everything is open source and for review
of the community and public. He could only try to do somthing once,
then he would be banned forever. We still most be on our toes however,
we shouldnt just trust everyone, check over everyone's work, it is your
responsiblity to the community to check over things. be sure to report
anything you see that might be strange, even if you might be wrong.

[Horatio]

If you don't keep your mind open to the possibility that even the
extremes of 10-30% of okopipi membership is evil, then you're not up to
the task ahead. Okopipi threatens to take away their livihood - you
bet they care about poisoning this effort.

Having said this, this eternal vigilence that must be excersised by
faithful okopipi contributors does not excuse the "you're a spammer"
dismissals that are so very commonly spewed forth by okopipi members,
and even by members that are 'in charge'. Know that in this type of
online distributed organization you don't know who is who, or even how
many who's are who, meaning that your most active infiltrators at
present surely pose as /many/ individual members; if one of their
personas gets caught the others will remain and possibly even get
stronger as a result of turning in one of their disposable IDs. Think
warfare, people!

Very likely you will find out that certain members within this
organization that are the /most/ vocal about remaining vigilant - yes,
as I myself am doing now - will turn out to be infiltrators. Other
infiltrators will merely be rude to people that show up to help; to
reduce the quantity and quality of the overall membership.

Myself, I find myself becoming a bit more arachnaphobic each and every
day.

Horatio

[Spy der Mann]

Alright. Sorry for being rude, Horatio.

In any case, there is no code yet. We're still working on the design.

[Unit1911]

Journeyman wrote:
> There are rumors going around that a spammer is inside the Okopipi
> committee, I blieve this to be untrue, it seems to be spammers are
> trying to scare the users, however ever IF it where true, there is
> little he could do unoticed.

PsyOps 101 folks, a spammer dosen't have to get into the comittee to
break the project apart, they just have to make you think they have.
FUD (Fear, Uncertanty, Doupt) are the strongest weapon they have
against us right now. The Source is open, the project is run by a
comittee, not a single person... items are voted on before but in
action. I truely think the fear created by a rumor like this is more
harmful then the actual damage such a person could create.

Fact: We need coders, and we need code. So accusing every person who
tries to submit code as being a spammer is counter productive. Take the
code, let the community review it see if it is worthwhile.

I'm not saying take everyone at face value, just give people the
benifit of the doupt, most the people here are good and want to help so
don't scare them away. Take a deep breath and relax, smile, and welcome
people to the group. The safeguards are in place already and more will
be added as needed to prevent a single person or small group from doing
any major damage. History has already shown most of these people don't
have the time/dedication to stay in deep cover for long while being
active and helpful to the community, they will show thier faces
eventually and the safeguards will prevent them from doing damage.

So to stop the next question, if spammers are 25% of our ACTIVE
community we are screwed anyways and thier is nothing we can do about
it. So don't waste your time.

[secondwheel]

Unit1911 wrote:
> PsyOps 101 folks, a spammer dosen't have to get into the comittee to
> break the project apart, they just have to make you think they have.

I'm not worried about it -- I'm sure we have a few around, but as long
as we're smart and don't get dragged into flamewars (which honestly is
probably the simplest way they can negatively affect this project) it
really won't matter.

> Fact: We need coders, and we need code. So accusing every person who
> tries to submit code as being a spammer is counter productive. Take the
> code, let the community review it see if it is worthwhile.

Agreed, and I've mentioned before that it's quite difficult to sneak a
backdoor, etc. into an open source project where many people are
reviewing, testing, and changing your code (...and you only get one try
-- if you're caught, poof, you're gone). And we are all going to be
particularly vigilant because we know the risk exists.

I have some concerns about the general public believing the group is
"infiltrated" or whatever by a spammer -- they'd be less likely to want
to run the program. We can cross that bridge when we come to it,
though.

> So to stop the next question, if spammers are 25% of our ACTIVE
> community we are screwed anyways and thier is nothing we can do about
> it. So don't waste your time.

I feel like even if spammers were more than 25% of the active community
we'd be okay. After all, the less helpful they were, the less
influence and trust they would have among the core developers. If they
were actually very helpful and wrote some good code, all the better --
when they finally tried sneaking in the back door code, or whatever,
and got caught, we'd still get to keep the good code they wrote
earlier! The project would win out either way.

~2w