[pmwiki-users] Pre-announcing 2.2.0 non-beta release

John Rankin john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
Thu Jan 22 23:02:43 CST 2009


On Friday, 23 January 2009 3:38 AM, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
>On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 07:01:28PM +1300, john.rankin at affinity.co.nz wrote:
>> My inclination would be to keep a first implementation simple.
>> To befriend a recipe, you supply a link to your profile page and
>> an optional one line message (like the summary field on an edit
>> form). PmWiki adds a "Friend since date". There are many ways
>> to implement this, all of them trivial, all involving some kind of
>> "Friend this recipe" button or link in Cookbook.GroupHeader.
>
>Indeed, if we go with the idea of "endorsements" [1], then
>attaching a link to profile page along with a date is 
>as simple as:
>
>    ~~~~
>
>This is just the "signature" markup -- it adds a link to the author's
>profile page and the current date and time.  
>
>We can also come up with a customized page variable that counts
>the number of endorsements on the page for various sorting and
>searching criteria.
>
>We can also probably come up with a custom action link or form for
>cookbook pages that automatically adds an endorsement (so that people
>don't have to edit the recipe page to endorse the recipe).  I see
>arguments both for and against the automatic endorsement: for a link,
>I'd like to encourage people to comment as well as endorse;  for
>a form, it clutters up the recipe page a bit and we have to
>make sure we're protecting against spambots.
>
>> Keep the first implementation of friending (?) as simple as
>> possible, but no simpler. 
>
>I completely agree that we should start with a simple approach
>and extend it.  Perhaps a simple link to add an endorsement 
>is our best first step.

I have to say that I prefer "Friend" as a term. Some reasons:

- it's shorter and widely used in other online community contexts

- endorsement is (I think) a subset of friendship; becoming a
  friend opens up more options for the future that we haven't
  thought of yet

- what would I be endorsing exactly? that it's secure, or bug free,
  or the maintainer(s) are responsive to questions -- without a
  comment, a reader wouldn't know what was being endorsed

On the other hand:

- endorsement is a more demanding term -- one would think long and
  hard before signing up, so it carries more weight

- friendship is becoming devalued as an online concept

So in summary:

- I prefer Friend (endorsement can be a category of friendship, but
  not vice versa)

- whichever term is chosen, I think ~~~~ may be a simplification
  too far; I would really like to see a comment associated with
  the name (rejecting any comments that contain a url)

So ideally I'd prefer a form asking for an author name and a 1 line 
comment (noting the spambot caveat).

Just to open up the concept a little... There is a really good
model for FL/OSS Adopter Categories (different people have
different attitudes):
- purist/activist
- champion
- pragmatist
- indifferent
- free-rider
- opponent

People seem to have a pretty good idea which category they fall into
and where their colleagues fit. Over time, it is possible that a
spectrum of recipe friendship categories will emerge. Perhaps this
is an irrelevant sidetrack...
>
>Pm
>
>[1] 
>http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.wiki.pmwiki.user/42177/focus=42196
>

JR
-- 
John Rankin
Affinity Limited
T 64 4 495 3737
F 64 4 473 7991
021 RANKIN
john.rankin at affinity.co.nz
www.affinity.co.nz





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