[Foundation-l] Use of moderation

[Robert Rohde]

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 3:21 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
>> wine-users - http://forum.winehq.org/
>>
>> It started as a mailing list, then the forum was set up with a two-way
>> gateway. The forum is where most of the posters actually post from,
>> but so far it works ... surprisingly well!
>
> If you allow posting via email, then you lose the ability to properly
> authenticate those posts. If you allow receiving of the full content
> via email, then you lose the ability to postmoderate. Maybe it would
> be useful as a temporary migration measure, but it wouldn't solve any
> abuse problem until you removed those features.
>
>> The main thing Wine found is that the forum promptly had 10x the traffic!
>
> There's a chance we would see that aspect of it. The mailing lists
> have a different readership to the on-wiki discussion pages, and
> that's because of the technical barrier, which works in both
> directions. Some people prefer the interoperable nature of mail and
> don't bother reading the wikis, and some people like web pages and
> find the mailing lists strange, and the subscription process onerous.
>
> Because I know that this mailing list is mainly populated with the
> former kind of person, I know that my desire for a web-only interface
> is wishful thinking.
>
> A properly advertised bidirectional gateway might go some distance
> towards healing the split in the community that we currently have. But
> then we would run the risk of losing the people who contribute via
> mail, on small screens or non-threading clients, who already complain
> that foundation-l traffic is getting too high. A lower barrier to
> entry, with a continuing lack of postmoderation, would only make the
> traffic higher.
>
> I'm not opposed to bidirectional gateways, but I do think we should
> move carefully. If the software is not up to scratch, we could lose
> what productive public discussion we have, and increase our reliance
> on private mailing lists.

I would assume that any email delivery of posts from a web forum would
be an opt-in feature for those that want it.  People who want to use
the forum merely as a forum without email would have that option, and
I'd suggest that doing so is a more natural default behavior.  Such an
approach would grow the potential participant base by adding forum
users who are put off by email, but hopefully reduce the losses from
people who "require" push-based email delivery in order to stay
involved.

Accepting posts into the forum via email would never be 100% secure,
but one could take steps (such as a per user / thread reply-to
addresses) to reduce the opportunities for impersonation.

I would suggest that the optimal solution is probably a system that is
mostly a forum but has a few email features as well rather than
thinking of it as a gateway primarily designed to be used around
email.

-Robert Rohde