Re: Planet posting policy

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 06:21, Peter Geoghegan <peter(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On 29 January 2012 18:42, Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> wrote:
>> I was trying to find a way to allow posts that aren't purely technical
>> in nature. For example, if a company started a new website that
>> happened to have 10TB of geo data stored in Postgres, I'd want to hear
>> about it as a good example of Postgres being used in "state of the
>> art" ways, even if it wasn't necessarily a post about how they did it
>> in technical detail.
>
> Are you sure that that wouldn't be allowed under our current policy?
> I'd have thought that was fine, provided that it was actually useful.

I think it is, under the "it's a use-case of postgresql". I don't see
how it would fail to pass the current policies?

if they built it on postgres plus advanced server, or greenplum, it
would be off limits, because then it's not related to postgresql other
than in "second generation".

> I'm unsure of my position relating to relaxing those rules. I wouldn't
> like to arbitrarily prevent someone from talking about a topic of
> actual interest or utility to the community on the sole basis that it
> mentioned proprietary software or commercial services in an incidental
> or matter-of-fact fashion. That wasn't how I understood the rules to
> work though.

Me either. It might be that the rules are fine and the *guidelines*
are unclear on that though. But the rule of "if you strip mentioning
of the commercial product, is it still interesting to the community"
would seem to allow that pretty well in my understanding.

> It might be helpful if you could cite a specific incident of the
> current rules tripping someone up in a way that was clearly against
> the community's interest.

Yes. I realize, as you said later downthread, that you can't really do
it without casting said persons/companie in bad light. But perhaps you
can try to "anonymize" an example?

> Bruce has a good point - the rules should be easily understood.

Yes, this is important. Both to make it clear to people what is ok and
what isn't, and also to decrease the risk of long-running arguments
when something *is* moderated. (Which has, under these rules, happened
extremely seldom)

--
 Magnus Hagander
 Me: http://www.hagander.net/
 Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/