Re: Planet posting policy

On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 4:27 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 10:40, Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 5:58 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I think that blog post itself is a very good example of content we
>>>> *don't* necessarily want on planet.
>>>
>>> See, while for me it's exactly the kind of post I think *should* be
>>> included.  Because I'm a working consultant, I'm interested in what the
>>> various commercial forks can do for my customers, and as a PostgreSQL
>>> hacker I'm interested in what the various commercial tools tell us about
>>> our users.  As long as it's not press releases.
>>
>> Right - and we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that Planet isn't
>> their primarily for us; it's there for the users. Some of them
>
> Agreed. Which is why it's interesting that those posting in favor of
> allowing more "commercially oriented" posts are the people who either
> have commercial products they'd consider blogging about or have
> previous been asked to remove at least one post from the planet... At
> least AFAICT, forgive me if I got one wrong or so, but the majority is
> certainly that way...

Well, from a sample set of half a dozen or so community members
overall. That doesn't really tell us anything though.

> But we haven't heard from any of those users that it's actually there for.
>
> Maybe we should post a survey on postgresql.org or something to gauge
> the *outside* interest?

That doesn't seem unreasonable.

>> probably only want to know about PostgreSQL itself, whilst others will
>> certainly be interested in the entire eco-system around PostgreSQL.
>>
>> In just about every other aspect of what we do, we encourage input and
>> content from commercial and OSS product vendors alike, both about
>> their products and because they're vendors we're happy to be
>> associated with; news, events, announcements, press quotes, the
>> product catalogue etc. etc. Planet is the only exception to this I can
>> think of.
>
> Well, we rate-limit post in other scenarios. If we do allow it on
> planet, we should probably at least rate-limit it the same way we do
> for news. While we could (and it would probably make sense to) apply
> the same policy as we do for news, it would be a lot harder to
> actually follow up on it on planet since we don't moderate the posts
> there.
>
> The only technical solution I see to that that seems reasonably easy
> to build would be to have those who want to post these more commercial
> posts on their blog register for a special "permission" to do that,
> and that those posts ends up being moderated in the same way we
> moderate news today. That might work reasonably well, but it's
> certainly a more complex process...

Yeah. But that's also drifting off-topic slightly - the question in
debate here is "do we want to relax the rules", which a number of
people have been in favour of, and only one against if I'm counting
correctly, and if so, how do we do so without going too far in the
other direction? We only really need a moderation system if people
don't follow the guidelines.

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

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