Cursing on Planet KDE

[Duncan]

Dotan Cohen posted on Sun, 12 Aug 2012 08:31:38 +0300 as excerpted:

> Where are the guidelines for proper behaviour for blogs in Planet KDE? I
> would like to review them to see how they handle off-topic and vulgar
> posts. I don't see a link to any guidelines or code of conduct from the
> http://planetkde.org/ website.

[It's worth noting here that I have no knowledge of any kde specific 
planet policy.  The below is simply written to the general case, with kde, 
where specifically mentioned, only used as the example at hand.  If I 
were responding on a gentoo list (given I'm a gentooer), I'd have gentoo 
instead of kde in all those spots, as I know they have a planet too, as 
I'm subscribed to its feed!)

It's worth noting that planets are, by definition[1] simply aggregators 
and relinkers/republishers of various entries published on members' 
personal blogs.  I believe the usual mechanism is that the aggregator is 
pointed at individual blog-feeds, where it matches against tags of 
choice.  Thus planetkde would of course match any posts tagged kde, on 
members' blogs.

Members can thus publish whatever they want on their blogs, since it's 
normally their blog, not (normally[2]) the blog of whatever planet may 
happen to be aggregating it as well.  It's only via the choice of tag-as-
kde-or-not that the choice of whether it appears on kdeplanet or not is 
made.


Once that is understood, it can also be understood why planet policy in 
practice tends toward the tolerant, since it's often hard enough to get 
people (at least many devs, who after all are likely to reason that they 
could be working on the software in question instead of blogging about 
it) regularly blogging and thus providing content in the first place, so 
in practice, a policy recommending applying the tag "if in doubt" is 
likely to be the case.

Additionally, I think some blogs automate the tagging, at least within a 
given set of keywords, so if for instance "kde" appears anywhere in the 
post, it'll get auto-tagged "kde", and thus appear on the planet.


So "off-topic" posts appearing on a planet (kde's or not) is actually 
quite likely, especially if the policy encourages sharing one's interests 
as well, as many communities do in ordered to facilitate humanizing 
people who after all very possibly only known "in cyberspace", at least 
for the first couple years, until they get active enough to start going 
to various sprints or at LEAST kde release parties (like the ones 
recently held for 4.9).


Offensive (as opposed to simply off topic) posts are of course 
different.  Of course it's possible to find people that will find 
anything at all offensive, but you believe that it really is offensive in 
general (racially, sexually, threatening content, etc), I'd suggest 
bringing it to the attention of the appropriate kde community relations 
folks, who can either deal with it from there or direct you appropriately.

Meanwhile, hopefully Kevin or Linda or Anne or someone else from kde will 
respond with a pointer to kde-specific policies, etc.  I could probably 
go look on the site and find either a policy or a contact to email, but 
I'd have to look, and you're a regular so I guess should be as generally 
able to find it as I can.  If it were me and it were urgent, I'd probably 
mail one or more of them privately.  Kevin and Anne's addresses should 
both be available on-list, and Linda's would be on the KDE site I guess.  
She's the one that I've seen acting on KDE's behalf to defuse various 
conflict situations before, so if it's serious, that's who I'd be looking 
up, here.  If it's more curiosity than anything, I'd wait and see if 
Kevin replies, as he's the kde guy I've seen around these lists the most.

----
footnotes:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software)

[2] An organization hosting a planet does often additionally provide 
hosting for members that don't have their own, and CoC or other policies 
may apply there, but those policies may or may not directly correspond to 
the ones applied to the planet in general.  From the planet perspective, 
where the content to be aggregated is actually source-hosted is simply an 
arbitrary technical detail.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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