Should There be Legal/Ethical/Political/Religious restrictions on what can be featured on the front page?

Since Drupal is technical in nature I think front page posts should not limited as a general rule based on their content but on the value they bring to the Drupal community. Since the post in question does a good job of promoting the international features of Drupal 6 I see it valuable. That said I would shy away from postings of adult nature and ones that promote illegal activities.

IMO the single rule should be that it is a well done Drupal site.

I'll repost (edited for clarity) what I said on the case study node:

The front page of Drupal.org is not merely a technical showcase. I doubt we would post an explicitly pornographic or "white power" Drupal site to the front page, regardless of the site's technical merit. This isn't an issue of censorship; Drupal.org is not an agent of any government.

Along those lines, I'm not too happy with the content of Christian Assemblies site. The site discusses things like the role of women, while Drupal celebrates that women hold roles of prominence and authority in the project. And says, apparently, other prominent members of our community are also going to hell. It would not be acceptable to link to a site that condemned a racial minority. What makes this different?

Originally, the post included a pull-quote suggesting a biblical connection with Drupal's name. I removed this specific item because it had no technical merit. I think other examples in the post push the line and could probably be replaced with similar content maintaining technical relevance without replicating actual significant content from the site.

[...] I would shy away from postings of adult nature [...]

I find sites like Christian Assemblies more offensive than sites of an "adult nature." Only the former tells much of our community that it's condemned and a disgrace to humanity.

It's a slippery slope when projects are judged by the community based on content, not technical or design merit (which is the topic of this site and this community). I have no public opinion on the site in question. I will say that there are many sites built in Drupal that offend me, but I believe in their right to exist. And there's no doubt that each and every site that's the subject of a case study will offend *somebody*.

Who decides what's appropriate? Whose judgment? Whose opinion? Whose taste? Whose tolerance preferences? Is this really the job of a technology community? I wonder.

I on the contrary have a public opinion on the site's content: I am pretty sure it indicates they are a bunch of loonies.

Doesn't make me want to remove the fp post, though.

Removing the post wouldn't make them less loonie or change their opinion on certain matters.

Agree that this is a touchy subject, and we don't want to be (seen to be) projecting _any_ set of morals/values/etc. Agree that the described site is offensive to some (myself included, for the reasons described by David Strauss), but it as long as it doesn't violate any laws, it has a "right" to exist as a site.

Agree that showcasing a site on our front page does imply some kind of tacit acceptence of it. Obviously we wouldn't showcase hate-sites, so there's a line somewhere in the middle there, whether we admit it or not.

Totally agree with Laura that censorship is not our job, but... this seems to have struck a raw nerve, which is a problem in itself. We don't want to pander to every crackpot who is offended by the shade of blue used on some website. Perhaps we need some set of standards, and a visible disclaimer something like "Drupal.org is not responsible for the content of external internet sites." etc?

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"law" is a difficult subject on the internet. There might be countries where the website could be illegal whereas it isn't in others. Our servers are US-based, so presumably US-law would apply. US law is well known (or, depending on your pov, notorious) for a very liberal interpretation of freedom of speech. For example, many German Nazi sites are said to be hosted in the US because nobody cares to pull the plug over there.

I also dislike disclaimers that state the obvious.

Drupal is free software; anyone has the right to install and use it for any reason.

But Drupal.org is not Drupal. It is a site for promotion of Drupal, community collaboration, and documentation. Sites with significant pornographic or racist content will never appear as front page featured sites, so there's no argument that front page promotion involves more than technical merit.

We wouldn't tolerate promoting a site that called a racial group evil, and I'm not about to tolerate a site that does the same on the basis of sexual orientation or how a woman chooses to live (on the basis of her chromosomal sex alone).

Who decides what's appropriate? Whose judgment? Whose opinion? Whose taste? Whose tolerance preferences?

"Choosing a standard is hard" is a terrible reason for not doing so. Things are not made ethical on the basis of how difficult they are to ethically evaluate.

Is this really the job of a technology community?

Yes, it is. Diversity and inclusion are bedrocks of large, collaborative technical projects, especially open-source ones spanning many continents. There's a reason almost every large technical firm puts extensive effort into related initiatives. IBM, Sun, and Microsoft care about diversity and inclusion because these ideals keep their teams together and promote a comfortable working environment. Public, open-source projects should care for the same reasons.

Laura made some excellent points, which are so good that I'm going to reply to them as my own response:

> It's a slippery slope when projects are judged by the community based on content, not technical or design merit

But they already are judged by the moderator posting the article. There are many kinds of sites which would not be posted to the front page for political or social reasons. It's just that the issues are usually clearer or more established. Proactive objection to organised theism is a relatively new phenomenon.

> there are many sites built in Drupal that offend me, but I believe in their right to exist.

Of course, but should bits of their content be put on the front page of drupal.org?

> And there's no doubt that each and every site that's the subject of a case study will offend *somebody*

Although this is the first site to disturb some people enough to write comments about it.

> Who decides what's appropriate? Whose judgment? Whose opinion? Whose taste? Whose tolerance preferences? Is this really the job of a technology community?

Yes, someone has to decide. And to be honest they've done a very good job so far.
We should probably just continue trusting their common sense and judgement.

I thought the article was well written and focused squarely on the technical merit and features of the site. The issue is more about what content is taken from the showcase site and placed into the article. However, it is tricky to illustrate a feature without lifting some content too, and I don't have an answer to that. Certainly we don't want text-only front pages.

So I'm inclined to agree that creating censorship rules and disclaimers is going too far and in the wrong direction. The issue was listened to and considered, some action taken, and the discussion may help to inform future decisions. I think that's all that needs to happen, isn't it? Moderating is hard enough without fixing problems that don't exist. If complaints became a regular occurrence the issue could always be looked at again, but it would be a shame to limit the usefulness of the showcase on what may be a one-off issue.

Assigning to myself.

I worked with John on this post. I appreciate all the comments and especially that you all have chosen to discuss it here in this thread rather than on the front page. There are others who are not as accommodating and it's worth stating it is appreciated.

There are a few reasons why I worked on this post. First it was a good case study of a well done Drupal site. Second, it prominently featured the main feature of Drupal 6 better internationalization. Third, there's been a reasonable amount of feedback that the only posts making it to the front page were some how part of a for-profit conspiracy. People wanted to see Drupal case studies used in a not for profit context. A faith based site seemed like a good diversification and an area Drupal was widely used but not show cased. For example we have almost three hundred members in the Churches group. http://groups.drupal.org/churches

I didn't vet the content on the site being showcased, I simply assumed that some people would be offended by the content of a faith not their own. I do assume that media sites will be criticized because of their content protection schemes and the practices used to enforce those schemes. I do assume that publishing sites will offend due to their editorial choices. But we did not publish the case study to the front page with the intent to offend.

David Strauss makes some strong arguments about why some of the content in the show cased site is inconsistent with the values of the Drupal project. But I think it would be quite difficult to censor case studies to be consistent with the Drupal project.

The original post was made on 25/11/2008 - 12:50 by fletchgqc. It was in the news and announcements forum, I think, for several weeks without incident. It was also added to the front page schedule for almost 6 weeks without comment. John added the images recently, upon my request to make the case study more visually interesting. This is the same request that I make for all case studies.

Gerhard makes the point that having a disclaimer that states the obvious is not desirable. Having disclaimers feels like pandering, but it might ultimately be the solution and it's a well established editorial practice.

I will say that if we choose to censor based on complaints we can pretty much rule out ever having a case study for media, a for profit company, publishing, faith based sites, or site built by a for profit company. Obviously the complaints vary from dislike to personal accusations of conspiracy to what some will perceive as intolerance. If you can find a clear set of guidelines about where those gradients of offense are, then I'll try to use those guidelines.

I personally believe we get stronger by showing the diverse uses of Drupal. We learn more about each other, and discover our commonalities and differences.

As always, I am looking for help with marketing activities including front page posts. If you want to lend a hand, your help is welcome. If you want to keep your eye on the front page schedule, it is open for everyone to see: http://drupal.org/node/280488

If you do come to consensus in this thread, I'd suggest you first discuss making modifications/improvements to this page: http://drupal.org/node/21923

I'll go back to listening now.

I would also like to address the hateful response elicited by this story. First, religious freedom is protected by the constitution, whereas hate speech and the exploitation of children is not. As far as what is considered offensive, that is always governed by community standards. I've been glad to see that Drupal's standards tend to be more open rather than closed (I have seen sites that support atheism, consumerism, and socialism all being discussed on this site).

As for some of the comparisons being made to Christianity, I am most offended by the lack of logic behind these complaints. Taking the most extreme example to judge the entire lot: a hasty generalization. Claiming that a Christian website will open the doors of this front page to posts about illegal content and hate speech: a slippery slope fallacy. What I find most amusing is that those who oppose Christianity often do so because they claim to favor logic, rationality, and a more compassionate view of those unlike themselves. What about Christians: where is your compassion, understanding, and sense of diversity when it comes to men and women of faith? One of my favorite verses: "first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother's eye."

I will say that if we choose to censor based on complaints we can pretty much rule out ever having a case study for media, a for profit company, publishing, faith based sites, or site built by a for profit company.

The site implicitly (sometimes explicitly) links the GLBT community with immorality, drug abuse, prostitution, incest, adultery, bestiality, corruption, and promiscuous sex. If the linked site had said that about a racial group, the post would have been removed long ago and never considered for the front page. I don't think it's fair to argue that eliminating this double standard risks a snowball effect.

That said, I don't think a comprehensive content policy is the answer or a good use of time. I'll just keep an eye on the front page promotion queue and comment there, as Kieran has thoughtfully suggested.

While I agree with both David and Anti and personally found the post offensive, I found the yoursphere.com case study even more offensive as the technical writeup itself was littered with propaganda in additional to technical details.

I think there's a rather simple solution. Being promoted to the front page is a privilege and not a right. There are some additional expectations of any post requesting promotion to front page-- why not simply require that any content snippets and/or screenshots be of the 'lorem ipsum' variety? With the devel module it's really not all that difficult to create such content.

And of course, we need to be vigilante to make sure no propaganda makes it into the text of the writeup itself.

As for some of the comparisons being made to Christianity, I am most offended by the lack of logic behind these complaints. Taking the most extreme example to judge the entire lot: a hasty generalization. Claiming that a Christian website will open the doors of this front page to posts about illegal content and hate speech: a slipper slope fallacy.

And yours is a strawman fallacy. No one here is claiming that allowing promotion of other Christian sites will inherently lead to promoting illegal content or hate speech. One person objected to the promotion of any religious sites. And I objected to the promotion of sites with offensive and discriminatory content about women and people in the GLBT community. This particular site happens to offend both parties, but that does not imply an inherent link.

@bomarmonk: please keep posts to the topic at hand-- your views about those who 'oppose Christianity' are not germaine to this topic and not appropriate on d.o.

I tend to agree with killes. But then, I of course have a "deviant lifestyle" and am going straight to Hell, and to make matters worse, I'm a *woman* so I naturally shouldn't be trusted with any kind of authoritative position. So take my opinion for what it's worth. ;)

Do I find the content on the Christian Assemblies International site offensive? Yes. But would certain people out there also find the content on, say, the Crooks and Liars website offensive? Yes. And there's a compelling argument to be made that the way that most of the females on Sony MyPlay are portrayed could be considered pornography in certain cultures. Yet all of these case studies contain very interesting technical details that all site builders, regardless of ideology/religion/culture/political affiliation, can learn from.

And sometimes, putting controversial (yoursphere.com) stories up can lead to fascinating discussions that touch on some of the more holistic ideas of what it means to create a community (and even raise kids).

The very fundamental question we need to ask ourselves is whether we, as an open source community (which tend to have a very natural bias towards attracting more liberal/tolerant/progressive/whatever people), can really be unbiased when it comes to deciding what is and is not offensive. Knowing that any time our hammer of judgment comes down we are masking technical content from all Drupal users. If we don't make sure our hammer comes down on both sides, we are, in effect, forcing our personal beliefs on others (which just so happens to be the thing I hate most about the methods of highly "religious" people ;)).

Personally, I don't feel I'm unbiased enough to render this kind of judgment, therefore I agree with killes that we should allow basically anything as long as it has technical merit.

PS: I do agree with the actions taken by David Strauss to remove overtly religious content without technical merit from this post. I also think that there are certain no-brainer "universal" ideas of what is offensive to put on the front page of an international website of a diverse community (porn sites that bill themselves as such, blatant hate speech sites, etc.) that should never be allowed.

David, I was responding to some of the comments on the front page. No straw man needed for those... but I must admit my slipper slope typo is a bit funny. I'll laugh at myself for that one!

Wordfalz, every piece of human communication is subjectively based on some political or moral position. So it's really not my post that is off topic; the title of this thread is just a nicer way of generally summing up the issue at hand (and I am responding directly to other posts here). This whole discussion stemmed from some users being outraged at a Christian site being featured on Drupal. In the end, I like how open source, especially Drupal, brings people together in surprising ways! Keep the love for Drupal alive. It allows for the web to be a more democratic marketplace of ideas and information, not just for you, but for everyone. My apologies if I offended any totalitarians by mentioning democracy :) I will ultimately agree with Killes and Webchick here: especially Webchick. Well said.

The point that David is trying to make, I think, is that "all gays are sinners that need to be cured" is "blatant hate speech". That it comes from a religious perspective is beside the point, unless one wants to make the claim that Christianity is inherently hate speech (a claim that I do not make and I am quite sure no one else in this thread is making, either).

I am well aware of the potential slippery slope here. But somewhere between allowing "kill all the jews dot com" and disallowing slightly biased news coverage of world events (Drupal is really big in newspapers, remember, and no newspaper is 100% objective) there is some line past which we as a community do not want to associate. Where that line is, I don't think any of us can say precisely. It's something we will have to feel out case-by-case in a hopefully mature fashion, with some understood guidelines.

The fact that we're having this conversation in public is a good sign, frankly.

Crell, thanks for driving home my point, but the site in question does more than suggest that "all gays are sinners that need to be cured." The site suggests that homosexuality ought to be criminalized:

Bills facilitating divorce, the legalising of abortion and homosexuality, and the 'liberating' of adultery and pornography laid the basis of today's moral crisis in our society.

It's beyond religious freedom when you advocate governmental persecution and imprisonment (we're talking criminal, not just civil, penalties here) of a large, peaceful community. It's hateful, regardless of the motivation.

David: The topic of the site are their organization and their activities. The topic is not "hate speech". Hence your ongoing comparison with a racism site doesn't make much sense.

There are many countries in the world where homosexuality is actually outlawed. Would you oppose a website on the topic of travelling in say Indonesia on our frontpage as well?

The drupal.org frontpage is IMO not the place to "fix the world", it is a place to exhibit Drupal sites.

I am very much inclined to mark this "won't fix".

I have no problem with Ethical/Political/Religious sites being showcased on Drupal.org. I do however, have a problem specifically with the CAI.

IMHO the above comments are going no where, and the issue should be marked "won't fix". However, I propose to change the topic to "Should we remove the Christian Assemblies International from the Front Page of Drupal.org?"

Please take a moment and read some threads here: http://forum1.aimoo.com/revival/Christian-Assemblies-Internati-1-26303

I happen to personally know of many people and families emotionally, spiritually, financially and sexually abused by the CAI.

I'm not interested in having an ethical debate here. I'm simply asking you all to do some research on the CAI beyond their own self-promoting website and read some heart wrenching real-life testimonials and then see how you feel about our community promoting this group.

This is not about ethical/political/religious freedom of expression at all. This is about being decent human beings that do not promote in-decent conduct towards other human beings.

The topic of the site are their organization and their activities. The topic is not "hate speech".

What would a site have to say to qualify as "hate speech"?

There are many countries in the world where homosexuality is actually outlawed. Would you oppose a website on the topic of travelling in say Indonesia on our frontpage as well?

There's quite a bit of difference between advocating criminalization versus coincidentally living in or writing about a country where that happens to be the case. Suggesting that there's no distinction is absurd.

The drupal.org frontpage is IMO not the place to "fix the world", it is a place to exhibit Drupal sites.

It's a place to exhibit Drupal sites that showcase Drupal's capabilities and give the community something to be proud about.

I am very much inclined to mark this "won't fix".

If you mark this "won't fix" because you, in particular, don't care about this issue, I will be disappointed in your ability to discuss community concerns in a productive, civil, and sensitive way.

Finally, considering your unwillingness to come to the U.S. because you'll get fingerprinted and photographed (a principle you hold that I completely respect), I'm surprised that you don't have a problem with using Drupal.org to promote a site that advocates persecuting and imprisoning people for private, consensual sexual activity. You don't like to be unjustly treated like a criminal, and neither does anyone else.

Who decides what get's promoted to the front page?

@rjdempsey See the bottom of Kieran's (amazon's) post above.

I have always had the feeling drupal.org was neutral - which is good. Until I saw the post today.
I don't want to argue against the content (even if I really wanted). I just think drupal.org should stay neutral.
Drupal does not depend on "explosive content" to find enough showcases for the front page.
This post is too far from neutral - way too far. And I think everybody can see that (even the "pro Christians").

@rjdempsey: Thanks for digging out this URL. I had tried to find something like that, but was not very successful. Especially http://www.oyla8.de/cgi-bin/designs/Nachtangler/index.cgi?page=text&id=0... is a very entertaining read.

@mray: Please refrain from using the word "Christian" in the context of this thread. "Christian" is not a protected trademark and anybody can call himself a Christian.

David, I'll reply later.

I thought that educated people were bigger than this.
That post is a technical case study on how the developers did what - not about what their clients do or don't believe.

I, as a mature thinking person, can equally review a website for "Meat is McMurder.com" or "Burger King", for Pro-Life or Pro-Choice Abortion activisim movements, for Muslim Outreach, Buddhist Prayer Circles, Jewish Torah Tutorials or Evangelical Snake-wavers.
I can separate the message from the medium - in this case concentrating on the medium, rather than the other way around. I expect other sensible people to be capable of doing the same.

I would not have been surprised to read about a Gay Fellowship website in a case study, although clearly there are individuals out there in the world who would have been as offended by that idea as some folk here about the CAI. A website devoted to reportage or communities in Gaza or Iraq from either/any perspective would have equal merit - if also done well. I guess some folk will disagree with that stance.

I would actually love to see a technical write-up on a porn site, because the pay-per-click and referral programs they have are intriguing, as are the scaling issues they face, not to mention the scam, spam, bait-and-switch, IP theft and leeching that (would appear to be) big issues in that industry. How (if?) Drupal can work in that space is - to me at least - an interesting question. We should all know of the important part that porn has played - and is playing - in the advancement of technology.
I think there would be much to learn from such a case study. regardless of the subject matter!

I may not be at all impressed with the actions of The Chinese Governments management of the internet, but I would be fascinated to read a case-study write-up by one of their network administrators describing the challenges they face and the ways they address them. You see how that can work?

You don't have to agree with someones (clients!) beliefs to learn from them.
You don't have to object to the graphic design of a newspaper because you don't like what is written in the editorial.

The CAI write-up in question was, technically, good enough and informative enough about Drupal and the use thereof. As Amazon said, it also added a little non-corporate variety. And therefore merited the queued front-page promotion in its own rights. This does not equate with "The Drupal Community" aligning itself with that belief set in any way - obviously.
Any problems that individuals have with the beliefs of the writers of the content should not color the technical value of this post.

Drupal.org really is being neutral - by not judging the website on religious grounds, but on merit. To censor based on belief/faith, or fear of offending reactionaries, would not be 'neutral'.

.dan.

I fully support the comment "Since Drupal is technical in nature I think front page posts should not limited as a general rule based on their content but on the value they bring to the Drupal community. Since the post in question does a good job of promoting the international features of Drupal 6 I see it valuable. That said I would shy away from postings of adult nature and ones that promote illegal activities."

this post was very good on how they used the international feature and the popup features and was very appropriate for our Drupal technical audience!!

Are the censors saying that Drupal.org should contain no case studies of sites with a religious or political opinion? But many of us use Drupal precisely for such sites! I am an atheist libertarian: I don't agree with the of Christian Assemblies International, same as I do not agree with the left-wing agenda of a disproportionate number Drupal sites. They should motivate me to use Drupal for my causes. I am grateful to them for providing examples, and even sharing code.

I am also an evangelist for Esperanto, and many of our sites are multi-lingual. Thank you Christian Assemblies for investing the effort into writing up your study and providing this excellent i18n example (10 languages!). Please ignore the negative comments--they represent a vocal minority of people who also care (a positive thing) but have allowed their opposing religious beliefs to confuse their ethical thinking.

Drupal.org should have a very narrow set of criteria for rejecting content, e.g. advocacy of hate or violence. There should be a disclaimer that the views expressed in a site using Drupal, and the views in a case study posted on Drupal.org, in no way reflect those of Drupal.org or the Drupal community.

@bomarmonk:

This whole discussion stemmed from some users being outraged at a Christian site being featured on Drupal.

Not at all-- it stemmed from objections to this organization's post on the front page. It is not a referendum on christianity in general at all, and therefore general comments about christianity as well as those that oppose it, are not really appropriate.

@dman:

I agree about being technically interested in drupal deployments in the porn industry and would have no problem with a technical writeup. However, would we feature screenshots with explicit porn on the front page? Or anywhere else on the site for that matter? i think not, lol.

As I said above, I don't think we want to get into the censorship business-- but we need to be careful what gets posted from a possibly controversial website's content in it's writeup.

I pretty much agree with David Strauss on this.

There's a difference between the GPL allowing any kind of site to be built with Drupal regardless of what any of us thinks about it, and whether or not something gets promoted to the front page. Whether or not there's a disclaimer, promoting something to the front page does imply endorsement of the site by Drupal.org, correctly or not.

This issue has seen a lot of conflation between religious sites, any kind of controversial site which might possibly offend someone somewhere, and this specific case of a site which promotes discrimination against women and and LGBT groups, not just in an article somewhere but as a matter of policy.

I'm all for having 'controversial' sites promoted to the front page, even if I have very strong disagreements with their politics, and if people scream "I'm offended' because they dislike the content, I'd not have much time for it.

But there's a big difference between drawing a line at /any/ kind of potentially offensive site on the front page, and the bigoted views put forward on the CAI site (I'd feel the same about similar views put forward by variants of any other religion, or for that matter political strand). laura s mentioned 'tolerance preferences' above - which is a new term for me, but without looking it up, it looks like treating homophobia (or racism, or religious discrimination) as a 'preference' - and presumably any action designed to prevent such 'preferences' being expressed would itself be intolerance. Whether that's the right interpretation, it's a trend which appears to be expressed by some of the views put forward on this thread by other posters, and one I fundamentally disagree with. Laws regarding censorship and free-speech do not apply to us, we have a choice what content we put up, and it does nothing to stop sites like this from existing. All it does is prevent the perception of endorsement, whether that perception is correct or not, and the distribution of some Drupal.org link juice.

The actual write up (at least the edited version since I've come into this discussion quite late) didn't particularly bother me, and I've seen fletchgc around Drupal.org - he's an active member of the community who contributes to documentation and issue queues etc. But the screenshots and some of the content from the site which has been re-posted here or linked to raised several eyebrows. fwiw I have absolutely no problem with case studies like this appearing in the showcases forum - even hypothetically from far right groups (although I might not feel the same if I actually saw one) - let them be exposed to as much criticism as they deserve there. But, while I'd feel very comfortable laying into a site in the showcases forum, I'm not particularly inclined to post long rants on the front page of Drupal.org when showcases like this turn up - if only because it will push them back up the tracker all the time. So to be clear, my concern is only about whether something is promoted or not, not whether the showcase appears on d.o at all.

Having said that, I don't have any good ideas for dealing with this in the future, and I don't think it's going to be very viable making a policy which can be applied - there's a lot of interpretation involved in any such case. But I'll also try to watch the front page queue and try to chip in there before things get to this point from now on.

@rjdempsey -

Who decides what get's promoted to the front page?

The site administrators have the permission to promote content to the front page of Drupal.org. There are currently 125 site maintainers for Drupal.org. http://drupal.org/site-maintainers . To help with transparency we've added some front page guidelines and we've added a publicly viewable front page queue.

In practice, I spend about 5 hours on average per case study recruiting case study authors and trying to increase the quantity and quality of case studies. They are an excellent marketing tool for the Drupal project, and our research in the Drupal.org redesign confirmed that they were extremely valuable to members of the community especially new members.

I currently have a list of 19 case studies I am working on with authors. Members of the community also independently write up their own case studies, and post to the news and announcements or showcase forum. If they post their case study to the front page queue, I'll generally work with them to improve quality, solicit more reviews from the community, and schedule the posting. It can take three months from when I first learn about a website and start talking to the site developer to the time it hits the front page.

We generally have the case study in the front page queue for an extended period in advance of the front page posting. We also usually post the case study for 1-3 days in advance to get members of the community to review the case study and provide feedback. Once we've gotten reviewers, usually by broadcasting in #drupal and #drupal-docs we publish on the listed date.

Usually there are at least four reviewers, usually not related by company or organization so we try to get some reasonably independent checks.

David continues to raise some very serious concerns. A standard disclaimer still seems like the best editorial way to separate between the content of a site in a case study, or a product or service being offered.

Kieran

IMO the single rule should be that it is a well done Drupal site.
And the article should explain how it was done or why it was done.

If a post just announces a site that is doing something the same as previous sites, it has to be a popular site and explain the management decision to move. When gm.com or un.org change to Drupal and explain the management decision making process, we do not care if the site uses only core Drupal and the Garland theme, the size of the organization owning the site will influence other decision makers.

A post announcing a site like primifluous.com will use Drupal is far less interesting because nobody has ever visited the and the decision will not influence anyone. However, if primifluous.com should use some weird combination of modules and do something trailblazing, I want to read about it. Perhaps they are solving a problem I will have on my next site. Currently primifluous.com uses only Drupal core and multisite, both of which are well explained. The theme is only Jazzlite and Jazzlite has lots of documentation online.

The post that sparked this discussion was about a site using internationalization in a way that I have not investigated but in 2010 one of my local English sites will add other languages and I am happy to read case studies that explain how it is done.

One other point, if the person reading the post cannot access the feature mentioned in the post, then the post is of less interest. We need to see the features in action or have a very detailed explanation so we can reproduce the feature on our site. A well done site is of no interest if we cannot use something from the post to improve our Web site development.

@David:

What would a site have to say to qualify as "hate speech"?

To qualify a whole site as "being" "hate speech" it would probably need to be full of it and not only contain such in several but not all articles. Frankly, I also do not precisely know what "hate speech" is, hence the quotation marks.

There's quite a bit of difference between advocating criminalization versus coincidentally living in or writing about a country where that happens to be the case. Suggesting that there's no distinction is absurd.

Advocation is mere advocation. People advocate for or against the weirdest things. If you don't like what they advocate, advocate your own agenda.

It's a place to exhibit Drupal sites that showcase Drupal's capabilities and give the community something to be proud about.

I've never felt much pride about any of the showcases. I don't think that's their intended purpose.

If you mark this "won't fix" because you, in particular, don't care about this issue, I will be disappointed in your ability to discuss community concerns in a productive, civil, and sensitive way.

I can assure you that you wouldn't be the first.

Finally, considering your unwillingness to come to the U.S. because you'll get fingerprinted and photographed (a principle you hold that I completely respect), I'm surprised that you don't have a problem with using Drupal.org to promote a site that advocates persecuting and imprisoning people for private, consensual sexual activity. You don't like to be unjustly treated like a criminal, and neither does anyone else.

Firstly, I do not agree that having a technical showcase condones the content of the site in any way. I however agree that there are other opionions on that particular matter.

Second, this group has absolutely no way to enforce any of their opinions on anybody but their members. This is contrary to the US who can (and are absolutely entitled to) do whatever they please at their borders. I happen to not like the idea and since stay over here. Also saves CO2.

Lastly, I've done some reading on this group and I think it is fair to say, that they are controversial (and that's put very mildly and considering that it is easy to make some random allegations on the net). I'd probably not have accepted them as a client or invested time in their showcase. If Kieran wants to put a disclaimer on the post, he can do so of course. I'd demand that he go back some time to put disclaimers on other showcases as well, though, and keep this practise for future posts.

Can we add a parental rating for questionable pages?

Some countries ban certain content. Currently the only dictatorships banning content are China and Australia. China is finally moving to lifting restrictions in Internet access while the new federal government in Australia is pushing censorship down our throats. We cannot do much about governments destroying freedom of speech. What we can do, as good Internet citizens, is to add parental guidance ratings to questionable pages. I do not know if the Australian federal Government are intelligent enough to understand page ratings or if they will bother adding that level of sophistication to their Stalinist approach. They are banning every site that ever generated a complaint or a question from any parent anywhere in the world. drupal.org could be banned from Australia.

If an individual page causes the ban, and assuming the Australian censorship system accepts page ratings instead of just site ratings, can we add a parental rating to the page instead of the site?

Personally I would only ban only pages containing the j word. J*va creates truly hideous development problems. Banning Ja*a is acceptable. For everything else, I am happy to have something that says You are about to view a page containing a naked Heterocephalus glaber. Do you wish to continue?. If a post describes an interesting use of Drupal and happens to discuss the development of a site containing erotic art, can we rate just that post to avoid idiots banning the whole of drupal.org?

The same applies for sites promoting contentious beliefs that may be banned by some ISP terms of use. Some sites get banned then the ban spreads to sites linking to the banned sites. I would not like to see drupal.org banned by association. Is there an international content standard we could adopt?

Australia has one other reason for content identification. Some indigenous people do not want to see the names or pictures of their dead relatives (http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/people/). I do not know of an Internet rating system that caters for that requirement.

There will always be problems with classification of content and people implementing bans that ignore content classification. Where there are standards, I prefer to see the standards implemented and people working to improve the standards, rather than making up arbitrary rules.

Dear Drupal.org;

I have found content on your site which causes me to become aware of the fact that there are people in the world who do not think the exact same way I do.

This is insufferable. Being the kind, educated, and tolerant person that I am, I demand that you remove all content related to those stupid ugly meanie-heads immediately.

It is my privilege - nay, my right - to be kept safe from any evidence of the presence of people outside my ideological comfort bubble. Therefore it is your duty - nay, your glorious obligation - to be vigilant for me and make sure I never encounter such information. Merely requesting that I simply ignore and pass over any information which may make me uncomfortable is simply ridiculous, as we both know.

I trust that you will heed this message and sanitize your content immediately.

Your comrade in the garden of pure ideology;

Garrett Albright

To qualify a whole site as "being" "hate speech" it would probably need to be full of it and not only contain such in several but not all articles. Frankly, I also do not precisely know what "hate speech" is, hence the quotation marks.

Pages and pages of search results I've linked to above go to objectionable content. That's a large percentage the site.

Advocation is mere advocation. People advocate for or against the weirdest things. If you don't like what they advocate, advocate your own agenda.

A website cannot do anything more than advocate activity. Anything more has to be done by people reading the website.

Second, this group has absolutely no way to enforce any of their opinions on anybody but their members. This is contrary to the US who can (and are absolutely entitled to) do whatever they please at their borders.

The U.S. has absolutely no ability to enforce its domestic border regulations on anybody but people entering or leaving its domestic borders. I don't see the distinction.

This isn't about removing everything from Drupal.org that people don't like, nor is it simply about disagreement. It's about whether we generate many thousand click-throughs to sites by featuring them on the front page, and have Drupal associated with such sites to people viewing the site for the first time. The front page makes up a significant proportion of traffic overall and is the most likely place for brand new people to arrive. Idiotic straw-man arguments don't help what's been a surprisingly civil discussion overall. Especially considering the post is still at the top of the front page and there haven't been a chorus of calls to remove it, merely a discussion of the implications.

Garrett: it is good to see that satire has not lost its value in our world, Your wit and your clear writing are appreciated.

@bomarmonk I wouldn't call it satire. I would call it trolling intended to derail a civil and productive discussion. I would have deleted it, but that would have just furthered his "argument."

I side with catch and David here. While we, the Drupal coders, consultants and whatevers might want see a case study on how this site was built, there is no way putting up a site on the front page is not seen as endorsement of that site. No matter what our intentions are there will be associations created in people's heads. Noone will care or remember what the article about the CAI was, but quite some will remember it was on d.o. front page. That's how humans work.

Freedom of speech has nothing to do with this. If anyone would try to ban the CAI site, I would be on the street protesting it. This has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I am protesting against associating drupal.org with them.

I also did not like the idea in the first place and try to ping someone on IRC with the intent of very cautiously ask "is this OK" but noone was around and now I did not want to start another debate that's associated with my name. Yes, now I try to not start another conflict if possible...

But would certain people out there also find the content on, say, the Crooks and Liars website offensive? Yes. And there's a compelling argument to be made that the way that most of the females on Sony MyPlay are portrayed could be considered pornography in certain cultures.

There is a huge difference here and it's intention. Noone calls out on Sony MyPlay that women should be prostitutes. The problem is not that the content offends us it's what they are calling for. And clear rules, to the hell with clear rules, simple common sense is enough -- if there is a controversy it in itself proves that it does not belong to the front page, period.

And now let me try to be constructive -- fletchgqc as I said did ask on IRC just right before this was promoted. I am not sure whether (s)he was simply polite or felt the controversial nature of the post -- if the latter, can we get threads like this before the fertilizer hits the circular cooling device?

chx and David, you are both hard working Drupal developers and I respect both of you for your contributions. I am a Drupal website manager and software user, so many of you have a lot more actual power over what happens with Drupal than I do. However, I wouldn't mind saying one more thing (even though I thought I was done-- sorry): a little controversy, whether it comes from a hard-core religious group or a gay and transgenderd group, is not a reason to prevent the group from appearing on Drupal's home page. Anything is potentially controversial and that is why Garret's post, even though it uses a different genre for its approach (satire), is perfectly on topic and actually helps to illuminate the problem here.

I do welcome discussion of this issue, but I do wish that people who point fingers and call names, realize that they might be name calling themselves (and perhaps not being as constructive or compassionate as they think they are-- again, this is probably more in reference to some of the comments I saw initially on the front page article). I don't want to add to divisiveness between folks here, but I think people have to be honest with themselves and the issue at hand. I would assure you that I would support sites being featured on Drupal.org that are the polar opposite of my own views and have never argued that a site be omitted from Drupal's front page, even though I'm pretty sure there have been political and social issues that I have not agreed with. Although, I must admit, I might not defend all of them equally with my own writing-- each ideology has its own champions after all.

That said, I am an advocate of censureship (voicing disagreement and displeasure with an opposing group or idealogy), but I would never argue for censorship (using power to silence or diminish someone else's right to speak), or in this case I would never argue that such a group should have its website pulled from Drupal's front page showcase. So the best way to handle this: use a thread like this to allow people in the Drupal community to actually voice their objections to the content (not just argue the issue of front page content in general). It's good to have a healthy considerately worded debate once in a while, and if we are to grow in our thinking and maturity, we cannot always run away from discussions of and even encounters with the controversial. That encounter is, I think, at the heart of a healthy community and in the mind of a thoughtful individual who does not want to stagnate in a set of preconceived, conventional notions about the world around him.

@chx, I also fully understand one of your points about not including controversial content on the front page; it may indeed be construed as an endorsement. However, if Drupal is equally diverse in its inclusions on that front page, it would be difficult for anyone who sticks around to understand that content as anything other than an endorsement of a diverse community of users who leverage the wonderful power of Drupal (I guess it's the momentary, first time visitor who might most likely mistake the front page content as some stamp of approval).

While I do think freedom of speech does have something to do with this (at least in the sense of how free designers and groups are to publish content on Drupal), I think I know where you were going with your other comment. Speech is never truly "free," but rather its freedom is limited by any number of factors (the audience's expectations, the speaker's ability to communicate, etc.), and certainly Drupal has every right, as a community, to determine the boundaries of that freedom.

From what I've read and heard from people in the know is that this is a cult, the leader Scott Williams just has not been publicly exposed yet and taken to court.

The church emotionally and sexually abuses their members, has absurd rules, everything from familial relations right down to the color of socks that you are allowed to wear.

http://caitruth.oyla8.de/cgi-bin/hpm_homepage.cgi?skip=87154567|||caitruth

On the opinion of posting them on the front page, I believe that it may be difficult to institute control as to who can post to the front page, but if it comes to light that a site supports a group that may be involved in possibly illegal activities, then I believe that at the minimum it should be made clear, that Drupal.org or the Drupal Association or other does not endorse this website or their activities.

Porn while it may be offensive for some, is not illegal. On the other hand, I would definitely be against a site that was involved in the trafficking of humans to be featured on the front page of the drupal.org site.

Adding 'Legal' to the title, as I believe that this may not be as much an ethical/political/religious issue, but a legal one.

Does drupal.org want to promote illegal activities such as sexual and emotional abuse. That it is masked by religion is not so much worth discussing for me, as I believe in religious freedom as well (within the confines of common sense and the law).

However, if Drupal is equally diverse in its inclusions on that front page, it would be difficult for anyone who sticks around

exactly -- and what about those who do not stick around? The fourth result in Google Christian Assemblies International is an article pointing to the drupal.org post with an excerpt

Christian Assemblies International Showcases i18n on Drupal 6 ... Recently the Christian Assemblies International website was launched on Drupal 6. ...

and the fifth post is the drupal.org node.

Now that I took the effort to add the word cult to my Google search I found in wikipedia and various forums that

... the "Christian Assemblies International". This extreme pentecostal cult has been judged by many mainstream churches and ex members as a dangerous cult.

Let me sum up my position: I stopped visiting the forums, now very rarely read the mailing list. I will stop reading the front page as well. Do whatever you want. I am simply an old grumpy hacker. I now go back to my place, patching Drupal.

First impressions are uber important.

I can't speak for newcomers because I am not one. However, I think it is important to consider the impressions that drupal.org is making for those pulling up drupal.org for the first time.

The above is not intended to imply that Kieran hasn't considered this.

There are many things I could say regarding the CAI but feel uncomfortable speaking about in a public forum. I thought I should mention this in case there was anyone who was willing to earnestly research the group and find out why they are regarded as a dangerous cult. Feel free to send me a private message with any questions you may have. My enthusiasm for posting my concerns openly have been dampened by those who are too quick to make accusation of hate and intolerance when in truth those are the very things I'm trying to guard against.

chx, I hope I didn't contribute to your grumpiness too much! After all, I remember the days when a few developers gave me a hand in the forums here and there. On the other hand, I'm glad you are out their patching things up!

I've seen an unfortunate trend (including here) of treating offensiveness reduction as the end. This trend is unfortunate because offensiveness is merely a red flag we should use to prompt further, deeper consideration. When offensiveness itself becomes the measure, we end up with superficial results, like a radio-edit of "Get Low" with the dirty words cut out. Never mind that the song is still about subjugating women as sexual objects, the FCC is happy that the dirty words are gone.

Along the same lines, we can say "GLBT groups find the CAI posting offensive, but CAI would be offended by postings of GLBT groups." That's probably accurate, but CAI finds the GLBT community offensive because they interpret their own scriptures to say they should. Moreover, they advocate criminalizing the activities of the GLBT community and therefore refuse to peacefully co-exist. GLBT groups find CAI offensive because of CAI's own positions against the GLBT community.

There was a similar situation during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Racial minorities were offended with the widespread Jim Crow laws and de facto segregation policies. At the same time, many whites were offended at the activities of these racial minority groups to obtain equality. They called activists within the community "uppity" and suggested people of color return to accepting segregation. Today, we see the "offense" suffered by the whites then as absurd. I'm confident that, in another 50 years, we'll look at the "offense" by groups like CAI with the same critical perspective.

So, we should stop looking at this as tit-for-tat and stop saying, "You get offended a little and others get offended a little, so it's all fair." Offense comes with varying degrees of justification. By treating the offense CAI has with GLBT groups as equal to the reverse, we legitimize the offense that CAI purports to suffer, no matter how much we disagree with its underlying justification.

Moreover, there's no way I would feel intellectually honest claiming to be as offended at CAI as CAI is at other groups. I refuse to brand CAI as a group single-handedly undermining the very fabric of society and civilization, as they claim with the GLBT community. Unless we're careful to analyze the roots of offense, the group claiming to be "more offended" gains unjust influence.

"Red flag" offensiveness renders the snowball effect arguments specious because the goal no longer becomes reducing offensiveness. The goal becomes carefully considering instances of offense and their ethical underpinnings. Few cases of offense can withstand such analysis.

fixing grammatical error...

Okay, serious post time.

Yes, my previous post was smartassery, but it wasn't trolling because I clearly didn't expect or intend for anyone to take it in earnest.

I am a conservative with libertarian inclinations. I wasn't happy with the content of Crooks and Liars (though I praise the truth in labeling with regards to its authors), and annoyed that early mock-ups of the D.o redesign used some Greenpeace site as a showcase (Greenpeace and their ilk are somewhat domestic terrorist groups up here in northern California, though more in the past than currently). And it's no secret that Drupal's userbase was greatly expanded during the 2004 US election, when Howard Dean and other candidates whose positions I find appalling and regressive used Drupal to build community-powered campaign sites and spread their messages.

But do I rant and rave and complain? No, because I am also an anti-victimologist. I see these things that upset me, and I move on. I don't blame and I don't demand that others change the world to suit my desires. Further, I'm smart enough to separate the Drupal tool from the message it's being used to deliver, and if people can't understand that, well, they can go use Joomla.

Incidentally, this is not the first time a religious site has been featured on the front page. Remember Leadel? I don't recall there being a furor over that. Please, if a religious group does something technically interesting in Drupal in the future - such as maintaining content translations in ten different languages - don't let it be disqualified from being featured on the front page just because others are upset that they exist; that they have the audacity to think the way they do.

By the way, I too would be interested in reading about the technical challenges overcome in implementing a successful smut site in Drupal, even if it's not featured on the front page - more for the access control and account management aspects of it than the image/video handling, so no filth in the screenshots would be necessary. Any takers?

+1
Yes, some percentage of naive visitors will interpret the top, home-page position of CAI's case study as an endorsement, and it certainly is hugely valuable (lucrative) publicity. CAI deserves some reasonable compensation for the work invested in making the case study and sharing their experience. If they hadn't been on the home page, I would not have learned of their i18n work. If CAI is getting excessive promotion by remaining too long at the top, a more elegant solution would be more contributions from others, promoted to the home page in a timely manner.

Many of the politically-oriented sites that use Drupal espouse philosophies that justify the use of violence by the state, under various fig leaves. I find this hugely immoral, but I am silent. Keeping the home page completely politically and religiously neutral would create a sterile environment. Better instead to encourage a dynamic environment with diverse contributions.

Any subject matter that includes politics, sports, religion, music, sex, etc. will be controversial to some. For the most part, it's readily apparent why a site is being showcased even if the content is to me in poor taste (bad music or wrong sports team). What surprised me in this case, especially after first reading through these threads, was how 'old school Drupal' the site looked. Apparently there are some bleeding edge things happening behind the scenes, but I'm not sure how many people checking out Drupal for the first time will see anything beyond what the site looks like upon first impression.

Should There be Legal/Ethical/Political/Religious restrictions on what can be featured on the front page???

That's a tough one and really depends on the image the community wants to convey to newcomers. Personally, I think a great design/UI will be always be the first selling point. Really not sure if/how you draw the line in terms of acceptable content, but I think we could clarify our guidelines of what we're trying to get across.

I'm sorry I didn't check the homepage earlier to have an opportunity to respond to such a hot and debated subject. Guess this tells you how often I frequent the homepage.

First, I would hope that we can all be kind and tolerant in addressing this topic. To be tolerant means we show respect in something we don't agree with. The issues noted in the title of this topic tend to be very personal to people so that can be hard.

If you know me you'll know that I'm a Christian (though not the stereotype). I was a bit surprised to see this on the homepage and expected this debate. I think it's healthy. So, here's my take...

I think sites should make the showcase based on technical merit. I see no problem of a rocking religious, liberal, conservative, or other site making the homepage. If this were a Muslim site or a campaign site I wouldn't have an issue and I wouldn't feel insulted. Even if the message was one I personally didn't agree with (I'm not a fan of the look, some of the content, or the way the content is expressed on the site that sparked this). I'm sure this comes down to the personal opinion and this is mine.

I would hope the write-ups concentrated on the technical merit and actively worked to keep the content of the site out of the way. Especially anything that would offend others (and offending others is easy to do). Doing this is respectful of others.

To address this site, I don't think it should have been put up there. I apologize to the developers in advance but, that site isn't sexy enough looking. It may have technical merit but the site isn't one I want to share with the world at large. Do we have an issue getting showcase sites?

Moving forward, we have a tough call on how to proceed. Can we get the drupal association to put some guidelines together that address this and legalities to these guidelines? I would like to be as all inclusive and open as possible. Yet, I want to present the best image of drupal to people who visit drupal.org.

> To be tolerant means we show respect in something we don't agree with

That's a fallacy indoctrinated by the church because they know there is no substance or evidence behind their ideas, and so they need special protection from rational criticism. We can show a veneer of COURTESY to people during discussion without actually respecting the silly, unfounded ideas and beliefs some people espouse. Respect is a *feeling* you get when you are in awe of something; the feeling I get when talking to religious people is as far from respect as you can possibly get.

An idea I *do* respect however, is the individual freedom and right of people to believe whatever they want and express those beliefs, no matter how ignorant. But that does NOT extend to the church as an organisation, which is currently able to express and indoctrinate these beliefs using unfair, advantageous platforms and privileges that no other social or political group enjoys. That is simply a form of corruption that modern societies should not have to tolerate.

Being 'tolerant' in the context of drupal.org front page means to tolerate the decisions of the moderators, in recognition that they are trying their best to focus the showcase on technical features rather than the content. It has nothing to do with the 'tolerance of religion' that you're suggesting, which incidentally I find very hypocritical coming from a proponent of one of the most intolerant and prejudiced religions ever conceived.

As to a solution, personally I think a disclaimer in the footer is enough. Something like:

'Drupal.org has no affiliation with the showcased site. Contact the author with concerns or suggestions.'

EDIT: ACTUALLY I JUST NOTICED A CONFLICT OF INTEREST WHICH SHOULD BE ADDRESSED. The author is the user who submitted the site to the showcase forum. But the drupal.org mod who promoted the post to front page should be contactable instead, so concerns can be raised with them, rather than with the owner of the promoted site. On the rare occasion that an article does provoke enough complaint, this would provide an appropriate avenue for them. Heated public discussions about religion and politics aren't benefiting the community.

We should trust the mods to deal with concerns appropriately (as they have done in this case), and privately.

-Anti- fletchgc posted this issue (which was good of him to do), but there's been plenty of Drupal.org (i.e. more than 5) site maintainers and administrators posting on the thread, including Amazon who I believe promoted the post in the first place. All of whom have permission to promote or demote posts from the front page. So there's no conflict of interest to be concerned about IMO

I want to reiterate what I said above: This issue is about the content of the showcased site and to what degree we want to police with what sites we want to be associated by showcasing them. The fact that the site showcase that triggered the discussion comes from a religious standpoint is totally irrelevant and immaterial. Please, let's leave religion per se out of this discussion as it is a red herring, on both sides.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion, already in progress.

> So there's no conflict of interest to be concerned about IMO

But I was talking about the future; trying to contact a mod privately instead of starting public threads of discontent. At the moment, the only person who can be emailed with concerns is the author of the forum post (via their profile link in the 'submitted' line). But the author of the article is not the best person to contact with concerns; the person who was overseeing the promotion of it would be the correct person to contact, to avoid conflicts of interest.

If fletchgc is a drupal.org mod, you have raised another possible conflict of interest - should drupal.org mods be promoting sites they've worked on themselves to the front page? Perhaps drupal mods should post sites they have worked on (or are affiliated with) to the showcase forum, and then request another mod to oversee its promotion?

At the moment, the only person who can be emailed with concerns is the author of the forum post

You may have missed this comment:
http://drupal.org/node/358428#comment-1199180 where amazon spoke on this thread and the reasoning behind his decisions, his contact tab works as well.

should drupal.org mods be promoting sites they've worked on themselves to the front page

Again I point you to the comment I linked to above where the showcase posting was worked on with another who has permissions to promote to the front page.

When there is an issue with anything on drupal.org, an issue like this one should be created. Where it can be discussed openly just as this issue is being discussed.

> The fact that the site showcased that triggered the discussion comes
> from a religious standpoint is totally irrelevant and immaterial.

Agreed.

I just don't like being told that we have to respect every idiotic idea and belief
ever uttered, and be especially gentle with religious ones, for no reason other
than to protect those ideas from scrutiny, scorn, ridicule and rejection.

Following up on VeryMisunderstood's response and -Anti-'s concern over the self promotion of the post, please see the revision log for that post, where it is stated who the author discussed the promotion of it with. http://drupal.org/node/315932/revisions

There is more than enough information there to contact the users, or to file an issue in the webmaster's queue, or even use the contact form at http://drupal.org/contact.

The fact that the site showcased that triggered the discussion comes from a religious standpoint is totally irrelevant and immaterial.

Agreed.

If you agree, then why do you keep slagging religion and its adherents with words like "idiotic" and "ignorant" in this very thread?

Chillax, brah. Water off a duck's back. Even if this site is made sticky and stays on D.o's front page forever, the sun will still rise and fall.

@Anti, real scrutiny of any belief is always appreciated by me (and I say that as a Christian, knowing this does not necessarily represent every Christian out there). However, you should keep in mind that not every Christian conforms to your preconceived notion of close mindedness or low intelligence. In fact, I once (like C.S. Lewis) shared this same prejudice to a degree. I would simply like to say, as I have really become friends and discussed issues with more and more Christians, I have been pleasantly surprised that I meet a majority of them who are genuinely working at a positive relationship with God, and through this, a strong and loving relationship with other people (even those people who have completely different lifestyles and viewpoints). Granted, there may be a big difference between one church and another (and I certainly don't know much about this group just featured on Drupal).

Either way, if you want to come across as a rational and serious person in your arguments, you could try to avoid sweeping hasty generalizations about large groups of people or the entirety of religious thought. A logical claim is always warranted by evidence. Even though my claim, above, about the "majority of Christians" is a generalization, it is at least warranted by experience. And I am making a claim, after all, about the Christians I have met, not all Christians in the whole world, let alone my home town.

All this, and I haven't even made it to a deeper discussion about God and belief? Maybe I need to start another thread? But again, any claim that this discussion has nothing to do with the religious nature of the content is not entirely genuine. This is a discussion about the nature of these front page features and where this community should draw the line between which sites are included in this area and which are not. The specific religious organization involved and religion in general have been mentioned as factors for where this line should be drawn. I say it's fair to argue that content of a religious nature shouldn't be featured on the front page. But that's a pretty big group to exclude. And certainly to exclude anything controversial could make the Drupal home page as monochrome as an IRS memo. Alright, this isn't a warranted claim: I actually haven't seen many IRS memos, other than the forms I get at Tax time-- is that enough evidence to support my statement :)

I think a finer and more useful line can be drawn here. A scalpel is needed, as opposed to a machete.

@mfer

Do we have an issue getting showcase sites?

Yes. While I've got another 19 in the queue and I've probably contacted 5 times as many to get those ones to agree to be interested in a case study, recruiting case studies requires a lot of persistence. Case study sheparding is still a task that requires more community enthusiasm. Although I suspect the page views on the front page queue is going to be higher for the forseeable future. :-)

Can we get the drupal association to put some guidelines together that address this and legalities to these guidelines?

Maybe. Larry and Bert are the legal representative's for the Drupal association. We can request they put this on their queue of things to discuss with the association's lawyers. Don't hold your breath.

Kieran

Surely discussions related to Legal/Ethical/Political/Religious issues not relevant to the issue of selecting content for the drupal.org home page could be referred to forums in other sites, sites that specialize in discussions about law, ethics, politics, or religion. anti and bomarmonk can discuss their respective philosophies at length elsewhere.

I agree with some earlier posts. I did not gripe about showing the Leadel site on the home page despite what I consider bad design. If the same site went on the home page today then there would be comments about children dying in Palestine. Neither the bad design nor the political leanings of anyone using the site would deter from the fact that the site developers did some interesting things with javascript and image files (which in their case is that horrible junk named Flash).

Instead of deriding their messy desktop approach or talking about how the world hates flash, I read about their use of javascript. When I want to rant about flash destroying the Internet, I can go to forums at other sites.

Bring on the Asian and middle eastern sites showing RTL and unusual character sets even if the sites happen to have content about Falun Gong or something else we might disagree about.

@Anti

Drupal.org has no affiliation with the showcased site. Contact the author with concerns or suggestions.

I appreciate your effort to take up my suggestion for an editorial disclaimer. Rather than say we don't have an affiliation, I would rather say something along the lines of "Drupal.org does not endorse the content on the site being showcased". An affiliation could be inaccurate.

I trust you are satisfied with the moderators two person rule. Site maintainers should not promote their own posts, and should get independent reviews of front page promotion. Whoever actually clicked the promote to front page check box and clicked submit is not what we monitor.

@Amazon - If I know of any solid drupal sites I'll see if I can get them to writeup a showcase.

I won't hold my breath on the legal part. I trust the site admins to only promote appropriate things and I'll stand behind what ever decision you folks make. :). I put out the idea of a legal issue and guidelines more for them to take a look at. If they turn down looking at it because they trust the admins as well as I do that's fine with me.

The front page of Drupal.org should at least be "work safe" in any democracy. I doubt we'll get much further than that.

@Anti

Drupal.org has no affiliation with the showcased site. Contact the author with concerns or suggestions.

I appreciate your effort to take up my suggestion for an editorial disclaimer. Rather than say we don't have an affiliation, I would rather say something along the lines of "Drupal.org does not endorse the content on the site being showcased". An affiliation could be inaccurate.

I trust you are satisfied with the moderators two person rule. Site maintainers should not promote their own posts, and should get independent reviews of front page promotion. Whoever actually clicked the promote to front page check box and clicked submit is not what we monitor.

I'm with killes and dbabbage: Drupal is purely technical and it is being used by people all over the globe, people with different interests and beliefs. I think Christianity is one big lie, so I would subconsciously probably not choose to put a Christian site in the spotlights. However, like I said, Drupal.org is not there only for me (thank god) so we need to show respect to others, regardless of our personal opinions. In this light everything at drupal.org should be Suitable For Work. If you don't like it, you don't read it, as long as nobody gets hurt by accidentally looking at it. This means adult sites, sites containing violence, etcetera should not be allowed. This ensures minors and people at work can browse drupal.org without being confronted by sanctions of parents or employers.

This means adult sites, sites containing violence, etcetera should not be allowed. This ensures minors and people at work can browse drupal.org without being confronted by sanctions of parents or employers.
And will not be banned by the idiots in the current Australian government.

I propose we keep it firm and simple: No showcase on frontpage anymore.
As an alternative, provide a block or menu link to latest showcases.

Some suggest we view the issue from a pure technical point of view. But in practice, we gotta draw a line somewhere. If some websites are allowed, why some others are shot down? If a religious sites is ok, why not some other disputable cult sites, or an adult site? No matter how hard we try to keep it neutral and technical, there will almost always somebody felt harmed or offended. So I see it all-or-nothing. Any line drawn in between is prone to problem.

Some argue that we should allow anything with technical merit, otherwise we are masking technical contents to all drupal users. But instead of removing it, we are just not promoting it to frontpage. The contents are still there for interested eyes.

And please keep in mind, there is no global standard for "Suitable for Work". Some of the showcase content may be perfectly fine in some countries, but are illegal or unethical in other part of the world. (I am not getting into any morality arguments here, just stating the facts). And people from certain part of the world may be blocked access to drupal.org because of it. (I am not suggesting it's happening, but it's possible.) So, allowing any contents may as well, on the contrary, practically shut the doors to thousands of drupalers/developers there.

Therefore, if we can't keep them all, we may have to shut them all down. It's far from a perfect solution, but IMHO, its the simplest and least problematic solution.

If some websites are allowed, why some others are shot down? If a religious sites is ok, why not some other disputable cult sites, or an adult site?

Because adult sites can get people in trouble and religious sites don't.

Because adult sites can get people in trouble and religious sites don't.

Religious sites may as well be. Some religious groups (I am not referring to any specific ones) are considered cults or banned in some countries. Please see my comments in #81. Some contents may be perfectly fine in some countries, but could be illegal in other part of the world.

@dami: I don't think you're being reasonable. We can't take responsibility for what gets people in trouble in parts of the world where non-democratic governments ban all sorts of content. However, it is disingenuous to suggest there isn't a sensible basis for deciding whether a site is an adult site that might cause problems. I think well over 90% of us could immediately identify whether a site represents the kind of content that will get people into trouble if accessed from the workplace networks of most businesses and organisations in modern democracies. It is common sense what this kind of content is. To suggest that excluding this from the showcase is in any way a direct parallel to decisions about sites with religious content is absurd.

There may be difficult lines to draw in this discussion, but this isn't one of them.

@dbabbage: I don't think I am being unreasonable. What I am trying to say is that: this 'common sense', or 'where we draw the line' is not as easy an agreement to reach as it first looks like. After all, that's why we are in this thread. And it's hard to execute or stick to when a decision is based on common sense.

Not to mention that people tend to forget how globally and diverse drupal.org users are. There are cases where 90% of people from certain country think it's totally fine, but 90% of users from other part of the world may think it's offending, or it will get them into trouble in some way.

I will not directly comment on the "modern democracy" part. Let's not get into it.

Is there a Drupal module for PICS? Could we use that on drupal.org and set a standard that any content falling into one of the questionable categories, nudity, violence, Java, religion, is rated appropriately?

Content with a warning rating would have to be kept off the home page to stop the whole site acquiring that rating.

In an ideal world everyone would be sympathetic to everyone else's sensitivities. Unfortunately homo sapiens must rely on each other to exercise good judgment in situations like this. Consequently, it is inevitable -- indeed, ineluctable -- that we are bound to be disappointed, and often.

It is good to remember that the right to free speech does not entitle one to yell fire! in a crowded theater.

> If you agree, then why do you keep slagging religion and its adherents with words like
> "idiotic" and "ignorant" in this very thread?

You're confusing two different aspects to the argument.

I agreed that things like homophobia and gender inequality should not be tolerated in a modern civilised society (and therefore not be linked to from the drupal front page), and I agreed that the source, whether a whitepower website or a christian website, is irrelevant; there should be a low tolerance of it whatever the source.

However, some people in this thread are suggesting that we should have a higher tolerance of things like that if the ideas stem from a religious source, because they somehow feel that we should protect religious ideas with some kind of false respect and silence. I addressed that, and as to my choice of vocabulary I think it is fair to say that compared to a modern educated ten year old child, the adults who invented the abrahamic religions were extremely ignorant, and to follow their teachings now, 1500 years later, could easily be described as wilful idiocy. I don't think my vocabulary is inappropriate or inaccurate.

I think it is fair to say that compared to a modern educated ten year old child, the adults who invented the abrahamic religions were extremely ignorant, and to follow their teachings now, 1500 years later, could easily be described as wilful idiocy. I don't think my vocabulary is inappropriate or inaccurate.

Considering Abrahamic religion is well over 1500 years old, it's inaccurate in at least that regard. But that's beside the point; the point is that you're flinging mud and insults even though nobody asked your opinion. The validity of Christianity is not the issue here, and your opinion on its adherents is certainly not the issue. When someone says, "Anti, what is your opinion on organized religion and its adherents?", then you're more than welcome to let fly with your thoughts about lies and idiocy. The question "Anti, should religious sites with technical merits, be featured on the front page of Drupal.org, even though they may feature content which may upset some?" should be answered with a response more in line with those of most others in this thread.

A common argument by atheists is that religions encourage their adherents to consider themselves ideologically superior to non-believers. You consider yourself ideologically superior to believers - all of them - and clearly boast of it loudly. So are you any better?

You're gonna give yourself a hernia being so full of spite. Accept that others think differently than you, then just let it go. Let. It. Go.

tl;dr: You blokes look uptight. You should try logging off; it relieves tension.

I've discussed this with David and we agreed to set this to closed.