The proposal to enforce AC posting for logged in members only on the main page was promulgated to all staff and members of the board 7 days ago. Thank you to all those who contributed to the earlier discussions and clearly expressed their own views, suggestions and potential enhancements. All are being studied for implementation, if feasible, when staffing and resources permit.
There has been unanimous agreement from all responses received in favour of the proposed restriction. However, it was also apparent that there was a wish that this will be only until other alternative methods of restricting spamming, abuse and other disruptions to discussions can be identified and implemented. This is unlikely to be achievable in the short to medium term; other sites are struggling unsuccessfully with the same problem. The long-term aim remains to include AC posting in all discussions if at all possible
Therefore, beginning immediately, all AC posting on the main site will be limited to registered members who have logged in to their account. We regret that this leaves a number of AC community members unable to contribute as they once did, but anonymity remains a personal choice.
This will not affect discussions in journals which will have no limits and will be open to all.
If there is a demand for it, I will look at alternative methods of publishing a small number of stories each day into a journal.
On a more positive note, there is evidence that because of the recent restrictions on AC posting a significant number of existing accounts have returned and are commenting in the discussions. The quality of discussions (i.e. signal-to-noise ratio) is significantly better than it was several weeks ago. Although we have lost overall numbers of comments, the value of many of those lost comments appears to have been quite low. There has also been a noticeable improvement in moderations being awarded with more positive moderations being given when compared to negative ones. It is too early yet to draw any firm conclusions from other site statistics.
janrinok
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday July 27 2022, @01:25AM (3 children)
Could you add something to journals that let you disallow ACs? Or do you already have it and I missed it?
We not only don't have all the answers, we don't even have all of the questions.
(Score: 4, Informative) by janrinok on Wednesday July 27 2022, @03:59AM (2 children)
Only be rewriting the software - which as you know is currently a non-starter.
But that would also defeat a major benefit of journals. They are meant to be unrestricted with access to everybody. The editors/admins CANNOT edit them, change them, or control them in anyway. They are the responsibility of whoever owns the journal, and we make this very clear. We often don't even look at them.
I can understand why you ask. The best that we can do is to have you submit it as usual as /dev/random and hope that we can include it as that topic. We are currently trying to stretch the topics covered to include discussions that we have not had before but this site is not intended to be 'anything goes'.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 28 2022, @02:42AM (1 child)
Umm... there used to be an option to disallow ACs from posting comments on a particular journal entry. And I believe you could also disallow "foes" or something like that too. Don't know why such options were done away with.
Guessing that code went missing too....
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday July 28 2022, @05:56AM
There still is - see my comment: https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=50631&page=1&cid=1263379#commentwrap [soylentnews.org]
I was referring to the concept of journals rather than their actual functioning. The were meant to be much broader in concept, content and community participation.
I didn't explain that very clearly in my earlier post.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.