Update and clarify Planet Drupal guidelines

paying for infra++

And yeah, there's too much useless stuff on the planet.

It sounds like some content guidelines should be drafted and added to http://drupal.org/about/drupal-planet (which describes more of tech parameters). Personally I feel more beginner kinds of posts are a good thing because there are always beginners checking out Drupal and these posts can end up being very helpful. I am usually not so interested in product launches, but if they're really about Drupal (a distribution, for example), that seems to be on topic as well. Portfolio entries can be a bit thin but case studies strike me as on topic as well.

So what about a stab at what's considered appropriate for Planet Drupal? Here's an attempt to define it….

Posts must be about Drupal in one of the following ways:

• How-to. The post is about how to use a module, how to solve a use case with Drupal, how to design for the particulars of Drupal, how to get at a tricky configuration for Drupal, how to plan a project for Drupal implementation, etc.
• Contrib module/theme/profile/feature announcements, preferably with some discussion or background.
• Distribution release. Whether hosted, for download, etc.
• Case study or project narrative. The ins and outs of the Drupal aspect of the project.
• Presentation or event post. About your upcoming presentation, or notes from a past presentation. Should not be just a repeat of what's announced on the DrupalCon/DrupalCamp site, but get into it more. No need for duplicates.
• Views, roadmap ideas, plans, etc. on Drupal. What you see in Drupal's future.
• Posts about the Drupal community. The people, influencers, issues that concern or thrill you.

What is not welcome on the Planet:

• Press releases.
• "Oh I am having fun" that don't have much relevance for others.
• Job announcements. Everyone is hiring. There are better places to post that.
• Hiring announcements.
• Posts about something else that just mention Drupal in passing.
• Site launches without some sort of narrative, case study or other aspect from which people might learn something.

This is just a first stab. Needs some fleshing out I'm sure. Once we have some consensus on guidelines, it should be fairly easy to handle the cruft on a case by case basis. I don't think it's a good idea to start weeding without hashing this out a bit.

If this seems like a good approach for discussion, maybe we rename the issue title here?

Posts about something else that just mention Drupal in passing.

For this part, on the Planet Drupal about page we should encourage people to create and use a "Planet Drupal" term rather than a "Drupal" term.

+1 on #2 from me.

Michelle

For this part, on the Planet Drupal about page we should encourage people to create and use a "Planet Drupal" term rather than a "Drupal" term.

The tag Planet Drupal (or Drupal Planet) is required for all the posts that are part of Drupal Planet.

Laura's suggestions are good, I've unwittingly posted some things to the Planet a few times that were less than useful to others and at the very least would needed to have been fleshed out more. It may be worth suggesting that people who already use a tag of "Drupal" to track their content specifically add another one for "Drupal Planet" to give a bit more nuanced control over post content that may not be strictly worth spreading to potentially thousands of others.

The tag Planet Drupal (or Drupal Planet) is required for all the posts that are part of Drupal Planet.

Actually, a dedicated feed for Planet is what's required. "Your feed should be Drupal Planet specific." A Views-generated feed using Flag would be perfectly suitable.

It sounds like there's general consensus on the points proposed above. Unless there's objection, I will add these to the Planet guidelines today:

Posts must be about Drupal in one of the following ways:

• How-to. The post is about how to use a module, how to solve a use case with Drupal, how to design for the particulars of Drupal, how to get at a tricky configuration for Drupal, how to plan a project for Drupal implementation, etc.
• Contrib module/theme/profile/feature announcements, preferably with some discussion or background.
• Distribution release. Whether hosted, for download, etc.
• Case study or project narrative. The ins and outs of the Drupal aspect of the project.
• Presentation or event post. About your upcoming presentation, or notes from a past presentation. Should not be just a repeat of what's announced on the DrupalCon/DrupalCamp site, but get into it more. No need for duplicates.
• Views, roadmap ideas, plans, etc. on Drupal. What you see in Drupal's future.
• Posts about the Drupal community. The people, influencers, issues that concern or thrill you.

What is not welcome on the Planet:

• No press releases.
• No "Oh I am having fun" posts that don't have much relevance for others.
• No job announcements. Everyone is hiring. There are better places to post that.
• No hiring announcements.
• No posts about something else that just mention Drupal in passing. See requirements regarding Planet-specific feed.
• No site launches without some sort of narrative, case study or other aspect from which people might learn something.

Your feed should be Drupal Planet specific. This is most easily accomplished by creating a "Drupal Planet" taxonomy term and assigning that term to only your Planet content (since Drupal automatically creates an RSS feed for each term). If you use a visible Drupal Planet tag to control your content, this will help the Drupal Planet webmasters with your application.

The points are good; only No "Oh I am having fun" posts should be expanded a little, and explained.

This sounds good to me; if we are going to start purging existing feeds from Planet, I think it's a good idea for us to have fairly standardized and uniformly applied process for removing folks. For example, I think folks should get at least one warning before their feed is removed.

I'd also like to see our guidelines cover dormant feeds so that they get removed after a certain amount of inactivity (a year or more). We've had a couple of cases where people forgot their blogs were aggregated to Planet and posted inappropriate material.

@kiamlaluno:

The points are good; only No "Oh I am having fun" posts should be expanded a little, and explained.

How's this:

• No "Oh I am having fun" posts that don't have much relevance for others. It's great you're having fun with Drupal, but unless what you're sharing can actually help others, or provide great interest, it's not appropriate Planet material.

@gdemet: Agreed. How about this below the Dos and Don'ts:

Posters of inappropriate content will get a warning. Webmasters may suspend a feed until an issue is addressed. Feeds that are dormant for a year or more are subject to removal. Feeds that have been removed can reapply for Planet Drupal inclusion through the processes outlined on this page.

Just noticing that there are already terms for removal, including dormant for a year. I propose adding to that list: "Violation of the content guidelines listed above."

I have updated the Planet page: http://drupal.org/about/drupal-planet

Leaving this ticket open as its original purpose is to consider removal of some feeds from Planet.

slightly related, I went through all the planet and talk sites and marked all old / dead sites, see http://drupal.org/node/934594

Then, what will be the workflow for "offenders"? Currently a "we are hiring" post is on the planet from http://www.zivtech.com/blog/full-time-web-designer-front-end-developer

Should we contact them and ask to stop doing postings like that and delete feed after it happens again?

@bertboerland - yes. #950350: Job announcement from Zivtech in the recent Drupal Planet news.

Uh, how about contacting someone before throwing around accusations? It was a mistake, and anyway, the policy only just started and was announced nowhere (I only found this issue through my google alerts). Please announce this publicly someplace before you start "purging" companies.

As an aside, if we're starting purges I'd like to nominate myself to the purge committee: purging offenders has been a life long dream! (Can we banish some folks to Joomla-ville while we're at it?)

I'd also like to point to the irony of this thread, as we (Zivtech) were in charge of the redesigned Planet page.

I agree, this is not the issue to handle each case. It will take time and some case by case handling to clean up the Planet. I suggest separate tickets for each active feed being questioned. And maybe a ticket for removing all the dead links. Since the aggregator module doesn't have a field for contact, it will be a bit ad hoc in contacting responsible parties.

(And no job postings is a "new" requirement, but arose out of general complaints. I'm agnostic on the issue. Perhaps we could create a Drupal Job Feed category for dedicated feeds just for job postings. That way job seekers have something to follow, and companies don't have to keep their hiring needs secret from the community.)

+1 to:

Perhaps we could create a Drupal Job Feed category for dedicated feeds just for job postings.

I find it very useful to keep up on who is hiring, and where hiring is happening. It's also a great way to get a quick sense of the current job market. I obviously would also like a way to announce jobs to the community when we are hiring, and I'm not sure I understand the hostility towards keeping the ecosystem healthy (i.e. keeping good developers working).

Personally I find the biggest crime to be excessively long teasers / full articles. I'd like to see a guideline of max-height:30em or similar.

It's a lot easier to skim over uninteresting posts when they aren't eleventy billion lines long.

@grendzy: Not sure about that (being one who posts eleventy billion lines on occasion or maybe too often :). There was another bug report recently that the RSS feed *from* planet should include full posts instead of just trimmed versions, which shows there is user need for the contrary as well.

I agree with Gabor, if people want trimmed posts they should handle that on the client side.

Yeah, the whole teaser vs full posts has been an ongoing debate. People who read from the web want teasers. People who read from RSS want full articles. I don't think there's any solution there but to leave it up to the people providing the articles how much they want to put on RSS.

Michelle

People who read from the web want teasers. People who read from RSS want full articles. I don't think there's any solution there

jQuery to the rescue? Seems like a fairly routine issue to 'fix' if that's desirable to others...

2 old issues about post/feed length

#299884: Implement Aggregator Item Length module on Drupal.org - max amount in post (on site)
#648550: Drupal planet summaries

Hm. I'm only just spotting this thread by accident, but part of the new regs has me concerned. I've of late been writing a post series on general software architecture. While the Drupal community is one of the main target audiences, the content itself is not really Drupal specific in many to most cases. I tend to syndicate such articles to both Drupal Planet and Planet PHP. I expect to have a number of similar articles in the future.

I don't know if such articles actually pass the smell test as written, though. What's not welcome: "No posts about something else that just mention Drupal in passing."

Wouldn't this article fail that test:
http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/architectural-priorities

Is that not a Drupal-welcome article then?

The entire point of such articles it that they are *not* Drupal specific, which is why I think they are extremely valuable to the Drupal community and why I syndicate them to Drupal Planet.

how about a requirement that posts to the planet have commenting turned on. since posts to the planet are directed to the community i think they should be able to support a dialogue.

for example this post http://willy.boerland.com/myblog/the_whole_planet_is_hiring doesn't have comments so i can't post a link to this issue queue for sprucing up the g.d.o. jobs section

What are you, so kind of under-cover Joomla-sympathizer? Cause that's what you sound like to me! Purge him! (Don't foul up the purity of my feed you heathen!)

Here's an idea, why don't we just start a 'hot or not' style voting system for the planet and then just include the real hotties in the feed? Or, maybe a Planet Drupal feed cage match? (My feed will woop your feed's butt!)

aaroncouch - this is already a requirement. See http://drupal.org/about/drupal-planet

"Comments must be enabled. We highly recommend, but do not require, that anonymous comments be enabled for the content being aggregated. You're sharing your thoughts, so why not let us be able to continue the conversation on your site with everyone else?"

time proved I was right :) #268798: Job advertisement on Planet Drupal?

@aaroncouch dont agree on that rule, but will either put comments on (pre moderation) or remove myself from the planet

re: job postings on d.org (not feed) there's an issue about adding Services Offered at #226984: Split Paid Services into Services Wanted and Services Offered

Maybe it's time we add more feeds? We could have some sub sections like Drupal tips, Drupal jobs, Drupal case studies, etc. All of them could then be funneled into Planet. People who want the whole firehose could subscribe to Planet. People who are only interested in, say, tips, could subscribe to that. Then no one has to decide if this or that feed is Planet material unless it's just plain bad and doesn't belong in any category.

Michelle

re #26 from crell, i was going to post a very similar comment. i've been writing the occasional post about project management, and i wonder about info architecture, usability etc. posts from community members. Are they not as valuable?

(also holy +1 on this issue, and i think the other guidelines laura posted are great)

@Crell, @arianek: That sounds like worthwhile posts to the community. We're referring to things that have better places, like job postings, things that should be put into module issue queues, etc. It's one of those things that's obvious when it's something isn't valuable to the majority of the community.

Ultimately, rather than adding more rules for Planet inclusion, I would prefer to be more inclusive and instead roll out customization tools so that individual users would have the ability to selectively remove content from feeds they don't care about, or remove feeds altogether from habitual offenders. If we see feeds with enough "blocks" then we could look into punitive measures.

We all have our own very personal, subjective opinions about what is/isn't valuable information. I don't personally care about job postings, or about a Firesheep story I've already read 10,000 times in other news outlets, or about NodeOne wishing people a happy Halloween, or about a report from a Drupal user group meeting in Belgium.

But for others, this might be valuable (or at least fun :)) information. And all of it comes from our community. Remember? That big lovely group of people we're supposed to be promoting the heck out of on the new site, not stifling the voice of..?

@webchick: The subcategories I referred to would accomplish that. Planet is huge, which is fine if you want everything about Drupal. But some people might only want certain things and then could subscribe to certain categories. I mean, there's got to be something in Drupal you can use for categorizing things... ;)

Michelle

If I understand your proposal, though, you're basically putting a burden on over 500 content editors that now instead of having to have one special tag (Drupal Planet) they now have to have N: "Drupal Planet Tips", "Drupal Planet Jobs", etc. This seems like a very error-prone process. People already are screwing up and mis-tagging things when they only have *one* tag to remember.

Or are you suggesting that a content editing team on Drupal.org would manually tag incoming feed entries in the places they're supposed to go? I think we have more important tasks we could burden actual humans with. :\

But in any case, if we went this route, it would make it much harder to follow all the news going on in the Drupal community because if I am someone who's actually interested in all of those various sub-divisions, I now need to follow N feeds instead of one. And where would I get notification that a new "feed type" had been added? Dunno. Sounds like a mess to me...

I seriously think personalization tools are the only answer to this, and any attempt on the part of the Drupal.org admins to curate a list (or lists) of things that are relevant to all the diverse target audiences of Drupal news is at best doomed to failure, and at worst going to raise ire and resentment among some of our top contributors, as it's starting to do already in this single thread.

What I was meaning is that we split Planet up into a few feeds. It would need to be very broad categories, yes, otherwise it's a major pain for the content providers. People who are now on Drupal Planet would be added to these other feeds and then the whole thing is fed into Planet.

For example, we'd have:

Jobs feed - For posting job notifications or for putting yourself out for hire
General feed - Basically what people are asking Planet to be, now, and would contain the vast majority of the posts.
Somewhat Related feed - Ok, that's a horrible name but I'm not feeling creative at the moment. This would be for things that aren't strictly Drupal but are of interest to the Drupal community, like what Crell was asking about.

If there's any other categories that are getting complaints in the General feed they can be split off but, of course, care needs to be taken to not split things up too finely.

So basically you end up with a few streams that all flow into the big river. For people who want everything, they subscribe to Planet. For people who want just strictly Drupal informational posts, they subscribe to General. For people looking for work or companies looking to hire, they subscribe to Jobs.

Does that make more sense?

Another possibility to add to this would be to come up with a list of fairly standard tags and ask, but not require, people posting to the General feed use those as well. This would make fine tuning your feed possible. Because we wouldn't want to require the use of the tags, it would be a bit hit or miss, but could still be useful. Possible tags are "Newbie", "Quick tip", "Views", "Theming", etc.

Michelle

I have to say, I'm pretty anti-extra tags here myself. I think that is going to end up being a bit of a mess (for similar reasons to what webchick's mentioned).

Still support clarifying what should be going into the planet feed though, and am not a fan of having job posts, advertisements, etc. in there... but I think that it should be much more self-moderated (ie. by the posters) than needing actual surveillance/moderation or multiple feeds complicating things.

In the spirit of turning this into a constructive issue I went ahead and did a few things.
1- I changed the title of the post- I guess my "humorous" irony wasn't very clear but calling something a "purge" has some obvious negative connotations.
2- In response to #25 I changed the title of #299884: Implement Aggregator Item Length module on Drupal.org and tagged it as a GCI project. It seems like a fairly trivial thing to fix, so why not see if someone will?
3- I created the issue #958016: Move Planet Drupal to planet.drupal.org, introduce topic categories, feeds, and improved UX and added it as a GCI project.

Let's add specific suggestions that seem actionable to either those threads or a new thread.

I just created another post #958318: Remove text about "what is not welcome on Planet Drupal" from /about/drupal-planet and have removed the section from that About page about who/what is not welcome on the Planet. Can we refrain from calling out contributing companies (Trellon is the latest victim of these attacks) until we have some consensus on this issue?

We're not throwing new open source contributors into a community mine field. Removing gci-proposal tag.

I've often thought that it would be nice, as Michelle suggests, to give subscribers an option to view feeds by category (Jobs, Developer, Themes, Drupal Advocacy, etc). This idea assumes that a global all-inclusive feed for the Drupal Planet would remain. However, as good of an idea as this is, my observation is that these implementations don't seem to work well in practice.

I subscribe to a ton of feeds focused on content management systems from a variety of open source projects and companies. A lot of companies/projects that break down their feed by sub-category often don't do a great job in maintaining those subcategories well. Although it isn't the goal of the implementation, there also becomes a perception that some sub-categories are more important than others. Planet Drupal has a history of presenting the Drupal community as a strong, inclusive, and whole community...and probably what lured me to Drupal in the first place.

I'd be curious to hear from Webchick and others on what "personalization" tools could be introduced.

At the low end, we have Views module enabled on Drupal.org. We have a "My dashboard" feature courtesy of Homebox module that allows you to put blocks (afaik, plain old vanilla Drupal blocks) in the dashboard and make them user configurable.

There's already a dashboard block for "Drupal Planet". So implement hook_homebox_block_edit_form() to provide checkboxes + a search box for each individual feed. That way, if I don't particularly like the kind of content Foo Company produces, I can simply search for and remove Foo Company's content from my Drupal Planet block. Done and done.

On the high-end, we could look into implementing something like Twitter's lists functionality, for individual users to be able to "tag" feeds under labels like "Drupal Shops" or "Jobs" or whatever. Then we could create a view of each said list (sorted by # of subscribers, descending) and let individuals subscribe to the ones that looked curated and interesting.

Another idea is "crowd-sourcing" voting, tagging, and other things to drop off the "bad" content off the main feed. We'd probably need to ditch Aggregator module and go with something like Feeds in that case.

These are just a couple ideas. I'm sure others could think of many more. Our fricking website is built on top of a powerful framework that's very good at solving these kinds of problems. :P~ Let's use it.

Hey, hold on a minute. Why was the content of http://drupal.org/node/453640 updated when this issue has yet to be marked "fixed" or even "reviewed & tested by the community"?

We most certainly haven't built consensus here yet, IMO.

Since the policy at http://drupal.org/about/drupal-planet is used when evaluating feeds for inclusion on Planet Drupal, and for policing (for lack of a better word) the feeds on Planet Drupal (for example, #960778: Removed advantage labs feed items from Drupal planet), and since this issue shows that more community discussion is required, I think we should revert to the previous policy, or at least remove the "What is not welcome..." section for the time being.

@webchick: If you look at the revisions, Dave simply reverted it back to what was there before this turned into a flaming mess and Alex decided to make changes on his own. So it was put back to what the community was happy with as of October 1st.

Michelle

"The community"? So < 10 people who had a discussion within the span of two days in some random issue in the webmasters issue queue? Who proceeded to make a unilateral decision that's already demonstrably caused anger and resentment among three major Drupal companies who are the "good guys," who sponsor Drupalcons, create and maintain modules, and generate useful Drupal material for the Planet? And all three of whom only came upon said adjustments to Planet guidelines because of Google alerts on their company names?

I dunno if you noticed that http://chicago2011.drupal.org/ just opened for registrations; now is perhaps the absolute worst time to be ticking off potential and past sponsors. Especially when we offer absolutely no viable alternative. http://groups.drupal.org/jobs is a steaming pile of crap.

Ok. Then I'm marking this "needs work" and suggest that we revert the thing about no job postings until Drupal.org offers a realistic "marketplace" (afaik slated for phase 2 of the redesign) and the Drupal Association can actually extract revenue from this activity. Until then, this is hurting us more than it's helping.

I talked with webchick a couple days ago about this and I'm in agreement that we just need to roll back the 'What's not allowed' section. We shouldn't have to spell out specific things (very similar to our community policy page), especially considering we are not set up very well for alternatives if we're not going to allow job posts. As we've been handling fine so far, if people think a feed is having problems staying on target then we create an issue for the feed, notify them privately (i.e. not as a blog comment), update the issue with what was sent, and we handle it from there. It's been working fine as long as people file issues for feeds. And we make sure we do a decent job reviewing new feeds that get added.

Down the road we can look into moving Drupal Planet off aggregator module and onto feeds.module so we could leverage things like community tagging and flagging. But for now, this is the best we have. And we shouldn't force the limitations on drupal.org to valuable community members and companies.

So here's my proposal:
1. Change 'Posts must be about Drupal in one of the following ways' to 'Posts should be about Drupal in one of the following ways'
2. Remove "No job announcements. Everyone is hiring. There are better places to post that." and "No hiring announcements."
3. Let's just bite the bullet and absolutely require a 'Drupal Planet' tag no matter who.
4. Remove "Comments must be enabled." as that's not true, but leave the rest of that line in about encouraging comments to be enabled
5. Under "Conditions for removal or temporary suspension from the Planet:" Remove "Feed does not conform to the content guidelines stated above: suspension and notify author." because this is already covered by the 'Off-topic' case just a few lines below.

So, as a call to vote, please comment if you are in favor or not in favor of the above proposed changes for http://drupal.org/about/drupal-planet

Disclosure: I found my current job via a Drupal Planet post and I would not have seen it otherwise.

1. Change 'Posts must be about Drupal in one of the following ways' to 'Posts should be about Drupal in one of the following ways'
2. Remove "No job announcements. Everyone is hiring. There are better places to post that." and "No hiring announcements."

I am not attached to the no job postings rule. I included it in the revision I made to that node because of what I gathered was a general sentiment.

3. Let's just bite the bullet and absolutely require a 'Drupal Planet' tag no matter who.

-1 for requiring a Planet Drupal tag. That is a technical architecture requirement that requires what strikes me as an odd approach. The post is not about Planet Drupal, so it should not be a tag imho. That's why I feel that using flag+views is a better way to go. But I would not require that of others, either. There's more than one way to create a Planet-specific feed.

Maybe we just need to rewrite the section into 'Here's examples of what would be good Drupal Planet content:' and 'Here's examples of what would be bad Drupal Planet content'. I'll work on some text later tonight.

And please, please please, no one else remove or delete a feed's items from the Planet without 1. contacting the feed's owner and 2. filing an issue about such notification. You shouldn't need to take any action unless you don't hear back.

Revised wording for the tag concept: Absolutely require a 'Drupal Planet' specific feed, regardless of how it is built. I support that idea. Too often people include things accidentally (for example).

Also, really, I get it that it's a ton of fun to insult groups.drupal.org. But maybe folks could be constructive about it instead of saying it's like "terraforming mars" or a "pile of crap." The issue to improve the jobs section is at #954674: Improve job content type and view and would love your feedback, effort, heck I'd even appreciate a "+1 subscribe" at this point.

+1 on wording in #55.

I seem to have jumped the gun in revising the guidelines at http://drupal.org/about/drupal-planet, for which I sincerely apologize.

For a bit of context and background…. What's there is what I thought was a reflection of what has been applied in practice over the past months and years, with increasing specificity. The "no jobs" part was pretty new to me at the time, included because it had come up in other issues, and in hindsight I should have questioned that. I included that line in the revision only because of my (mistaken) impression that this was a previously decided-upon criterion. I feel really stupid now. I even opened a ticket (http://drupal.org/node/953668) to propose a separate jobs planet feed aggregator category to fill what I perceived to be a substantial content gap this policy would create. In #18 I said I'm agnostic, but in all honesty I like variety of job announcements we've seen on the Planet -- and certainly have posted them many times over the years.

The title of this issue at the time of page revision was "Purge Planet" so the status was not changed because the issue's "original purpose is to consider removal of some feeds from Planet." I just wanted to add some transparency to the apparent goal of the intended "purge" so as to avoid willy nilly deletions of feeds. At the time it did not seem right to balkanize the discussion into another thread to continue the discussion of the guidelines. Also probably a mistake.

My bad, and my apologies to everyone, especially to those who may have taken offense.

If this issue is now focused on revising the guidelines, instead of Purging the Planet or "Improve UX of Planet Drupal" (which could include anything from feed length to redesign look and feel to feature requests such as bookmarking or rating), then we should probably re-title this issue to something like "Clarify Planet Drupal Guidelines".

(As for the mere existence of guidelines, I do believe we need something clear enough to at least guide the feed addition process. And as for my "terraforming mars" remark in that thread, it was in the context of a +1 for the concept of improving jobs on g.d.o. as likely a better solution than a dedicated Planet feed just for jobs.)

Hey, I really need to apologize for my tone up above. :( I just get fired up and tend to fly off the handle when I see contributors getting slapped upside the head, but of course the people doing the slapping are also contributors who are trying to solve other problems. And I need to remember that. I was just taken by surprise because I thought due to the "needs review" status on this issue and the heated discussion that this policy was still under active discussion, when in actuality it was being actively enforced despite how contentious it was. I do still think this needs more discussion, but I certainly don't mean to disparage the efforts of people trying to make Drupal Planet a better resource.

I also managed to disparage the g.d.o admins by insulting http://groups.drupal.org/jobs, which, to be fair, is much better than it ever was thanks to the efforts of greggles and others. But it's not quite where it needs to be to be a replacement for Drupal Planet in terms of reach (sample case in point: Dave Reid learned of Palantir openings through /planet, not /jobs), and moreover it's not monetizable yet, so doesn't qualify under "People can buy ads on Drupal.org if they need them and pay for infra that way" (a sentiment I of course generally strongly agree with.)

So what I should have said is that once we have something like https://infrastructure.drupal.org/drupal.org-style-guide/prototype/jobs.... featured prominently on the main drupal.org website, along some way to create "featured" jobs that are sticky, coloured differently, and/or show a company logo or whatnot, then I think this policy makes a lot of sense to revisit. But until then, it's too premature, and it's taking away resources from both businesses and Drupal developers looking for work. So in the meantime, we should keep the general "good things to post / less good things to post" idea, and generally handle excessive advertising/self-promotion the same way we handle everything else: by common sense, on a case-by-case basis. Because if we were applying our team's general rule here, I honestly don't think any of the three companies who got slapped for this would've been slapped. And I'm highly against applying rules for rules' sake.

Once again, apologies to anyone I offended. I'm truly, deeply sorry. :( And will make sure to watch my tone in the future.

I think I'm going to schedule a "Webmasters group hug" BOF for DrupalCon Chicago.

Like I said in #3, I think people need to be using a tag that's specific for Planet Drupal (like "Planet Drupal") and not a generic "Drupal" tag. Some of the posts that have been brought up recently, including the job announcements on Planet, are in generic "Drupal" feeds and are still being syndicated to Planet.

Re: #5:

The tag Planet Drupal (or Drupal Planet) is required for all the posts that are part of Drupal Planet.

As far as I know, this isn't being enforced. I think it's likely that some people have been posting Drupal-related content to their own sites but are unaware that they're syndicating to Planet and/or are violating this guideline.

Of the 36 sites currently listed at admin/content/aggregator that start with the letter "A", 15 of them are using a generic "Drupal" tag (or syndicate every post that is promoted to their front page). Enforcing the use of a separate "Planet Drupal" tag would go a long way to prevent accidental posting to Planet.

@Dave Reid: I'll be there! I give good hugs.

In regard to #55- I think what's needed are some general 'editorial guidelines' that spell out a bit more clearly the general qualities in posting that we're looking for beyond just having Drupal-related posts tagged with Drupal Planet. Something along the lines of:

Editorial Guidelines

We welcome all sorts of Drupal-related posts in the Drupal Planet, but we also want to maintain the quality of the feed. As such we have developed the following questions to help you determine if your post belongs on the planet:

• Is your post already in the Drupal Handbook/drupal.org documentation? If not, is it more appropriate as documentation?
• Does your post add value to the conversation on a specific topic outside of what is already available on g.d.o., in the handbook, in the forums, etc?
• Does your post contain enough substance to engage the subscribers to the Drupal Planet?
• etc. etc. etc.

Thoughts?

so... it seems like there's a consensus to remove the "What's *not* welcome" section. Can someone either revert back to my changes or remove it themselves?

Okay, after the discussion on #958318: Remove text about "what is not welcome on Planet Drupal" from /about/drupal-planet, perhaps it's time to review the actual Planet Drupal guidelines and come up with action items for revising the text at http://drupal.org/about/drupal-planet

From the discussion, I gather that a) job postings restriction should be removed, b) descriptions of posts off topic should be simplified and clarified.

The idea of creating Planet Drupal channels (including a job listings channel) should be put in a separate ticket, imho, if anyone wants to pursue that.

@lauras: why do we have to have any restrictions listed? Self policing works fine on the planet, outside of the occasional obvious mistake post (I know I've been guilty in that area). Why don't we just say what we want, i.e. ask people to take others into consideration before adding a post, and deal with obvious misuse/abuse/mistakes as they arise?

The planet is a very high value feed full of awesome high quality posts- we don't need (and I don't want) the webmasters to police the feeds once they're added.

@lauras: why do we have to have any restrictions listed?

The why is discussed by several people in this thread. The thread arose out of ongoing complaints about this or that post. There were no clear guidelines for Planet Drupal addition, from which webmasters could work. This issue is a transparent process to document what criteria, if any, should be considered. This issue is also still open. #958318: Remove text about "what is not welcome on Planet Drupal" from /about/drupal-planet represents a fork in this conversation and technically is a duplicate issue.

The self policing probably works because there are users with their own feed on Planet Drupal who agreed to some level to the Planet Drupal requirements.

I doubt that without a description of what is allowed people would not start to add what they want, including what would not be considered adeguate; if it does not happen now is because there are requirements, and users report when they find content that is not worth Planet Drupal (if not in the drupal.org webmaster queue, directly to who handles the feed).

@kiamlaluno- well, maybe you could explain why it was high quality before the webmasters decided they had the right to restrict the content? (it's easy enough to see when this "rule" was put in place: http://drupal.org/node/453640/revisions/view/1140758/1176820 ). These rules are only a year old, and the only reason I even heard about them was because of a google alert for my company in a post about enforcing this new "policy". The planet was fine, and did not require the webmasters to "fix" it. Furthermore, this is not a webmaster resource, but a community one, and the webmasters should not have the right to tell the community what content is, or is not, appropriate unless it's a violation of the Drupal Code of Conduct and/or it has been agreed to by the broader community or (in my opinion) dictated by the Drupal Association. Otherwise you are usurping community powers and dictating what is valuable, and you have no right (outside of a checkbox on d.o.) to do so.

The community has grown immensely over the past few years. The ad hoc cowboy approach to managing *.d.o is no longer feasible. Inasmuch as the content on Planet Drupal is aggregated and feeds must not only be administered but maintained, updated occasionally, and the aggregation process must be sustained by the d.o infrastructure, I feel Planet Drupal does fall under the community management of content umbrella.

Webmasters have been managing Planet Drupal since its inception years ago. What's different now is that we've added some transparency to the process. This very discussion in this issue is part of that transparency. Rather than having anyone who happens to have administrative privileges add whomever they want for whatever reasons they may have, the webmasters team has been establishing guidelines and policies so that team members can act with clear direction and parameters. How was this decided? Bit by bit, as needs arose, as scratches got itched in this do-ocracy.

None of this is carved in stone. We're still evaluating process and parameters, and probably will as long as this site lives on with a vibrant community.

It is my opinion, as an individual who happens to be a member of the webmasters team and on the Board of the Drupal Association, that this area does not fall under the Drupal Association's mission.

Without any objective parameters, I think it's rather difficult to speak of high or low quality. This is getting a little OT, anyway.

@kiam, I think you're starting to see the light! There are no real objective paramaters that would lead you to believe there's a problem that needs the webmasters to "fix" it, and thus there's no reason for such hostile and confrontational "rules".

The rules do not need to be either hostile or confrontational. They are simply a set of objective guidelines. Without them, each site maintainer decides whether a feed should be added based on his or her own judgment. With them, there is a clear set of guidelines to check against. To me, the latter is definitely preferable.

Just because you can't get over the fact that you were used as an example doesn't mean the entire process needs to be derailed.

Michelle

@Alex UA: You took me wrong.
What I mean is that you are referring to a previous status of Planet Drupal without to have an objective method to measure it. Nobody is referring to the quality of Planet Drupal, but to what it desirable to see in Planet Drupal; that is why I said it's getting a little off topic.

The rules do not need to be either hostile or confrontational.

I agree, but the rules that were put in place were both (as evidenced by my continued involvement here). I don't think having positive guidelines would be confrontational, but telling the community what is or is not important, and thus what they cannot talk about on the planet, is both.

Without them, each site maintainer decides whether a feed should be added based on his or her own judgment.

And with them you are asking me to trust the judgement of the webmasters over the individual and/or organizational community members. Quite frankly, the topics covering this display a pretty remarkable lack of judgement in the webmasters queue, while the content in the planet reveals quite a lot of good judgement on the part of the community. The community is already policing itself, and it's doing a good job of it.

Could we do more to promote good content on the planet? Sure!
Could we improve the UX, giving people more control over what they subscribe to? Of course.
Do you have the right to tell contributing individuals or companies what is or is not important to the community at large? Nope, you don't.
You don't own the planet. We all do. And if that's not correct, then bigger changes need to be sought around here, in a more aggressive/assertive manor by a more organized group of concerned community members.

@Alex: You're not making any sense. The "webmasters," AKA site maintainers, have been deciding what does and doesn't go on Planet from the start so I don't know where you're getting this whole us VS the community thing. What we are trying to do here is set up consistent rules so it's not hit or miss what gets added based on the whim of the maintainer who happened to get an itch to fulfill requests that day.

You seem to be under some delusion that the current feeds on Planet got there by the blessing of the community at large. Nope. They got there by filing issues or bugging site maintainers on IRC to add them. No, we don't "own" Planet but we do control the little switch that controls what feeds are on it. So far we've done a reasonable job of doing that fairly, I think, but having standards is a good thing and will ensure we continue keeping Planet something worth subscribing to.

Michelle

@michelle- sorry, I think we're talking about different things. You are referring to the feeds themselves, while I am talking about content within the feeds. The webmasters have always been the place to get listed, but only in January of last year did they decide they had the right to decide what was in the feeds themselves (specifically, what was not welcome). You don't need to call it censorship, but it's certainly telling the community at large what is, or is not, acceptable for larger dissemination, without any community mandate to do so. (Governance only works with the consent of the governed)

That's really not all that much different. Decisions on adding/removing were always based on the content of the feeds. All that's changed is that we want to put in writing exactly what content results in addition or removal rather than leaving it up to whoever is paying attention at that moment. Again, I think that's a good thing.

Michelle

Having standards helps also to use the same criteria for whoever asks to add their feed to Planet Drupal.

It's clear that feeds have been always added from site maintainers: the configuration page is visible to whom has an administration permission. I am not sure I would give an administer xyz permission to users who don't have a specific role (and they symply are authenticated users).

Governance only works with the consent of the governed

I am not sure the Governance comparison works: the secretary of a department is not elected from the governed people, nor do the people can say anything about who should be secretary of a department.
Who becomes president of the United States of America is not the person who had the majority of the people votes; delegates have their weight in deciding who will be president (see what happened in 2004).

@kiam, you are talking about the *adminsitrators* of the law, not the *creators* of it. In the US at least, it is our legislative bodies (i.e. elected officials) who create the laws, and they are elected (indirect democracy). In this case the webmasters have (naturally, over time) assumed both positions, and it is the rule creating (not rule enforcing) aspect that I have serious issues with.

You have issues because you have this "us" vs "them" mentality. The site maintainers are members of the community as well. The only difference is that we've jumped in to help and have been trusted with the responsibility of more access on this site. We aren't some elite group going off in secret and coming back with rules to impose on the community.

The whole purpose of this issue, which seems to have gotten hopelessly off topic, is to transparently and publicly form the rules to which we will be bound. This issue is visible to the public and any registered user can comment on it. This is the community at work here forming the guidelines. Once the community decides on the guidelines, the site maintainers will follow them.

Michelle

@Michelle- you are right, I certainly do see things in the webmasters queue as an "us" and-or-vs "them" mentaIity, since I have been told more than 10 times in the past week that my voice (and by extension, any non-webmaster) doesn't carry the same weight as a webmaster. You're right, that this is off topic, and I actually started a thread that you're welcome to comment on, if you'd like: Define Limits of Community Involvement in Webmasters Issue Queue.

The whole purpose of this issue was to define rules that you would then use to ban people from the planet (I won't repeat the original contentious word, since I know you didn't understand my personal objections to it). In fact, my firm was mentioned both here and in a separate queue as one that needed to be warned. It's precisely because of this confrontational matter of handling content moderation and business relations within the community that I have been staying in the webmaster issue queue.

To follow the comparison, there are rules/regulations created from a department, which is head from a person not elected from the governed people. It is then true that who is part of the executive can create rules.
If you look at what happens outside of USA, in other countries the executive can create regulations that have the same validity of a law.

If your comparison can be applied, then site maintainers can create rules.
If you are saying that site maintainers cannot create rules (I don't see why site maintainers cannot create rules for how to do tasks assigned to them, though), then that is a different issue that needs to be resolved with a different issue. The topic here is the rules that should be applied when somebody is asking to get their feed listed in Planet Drupal.

I don't know who told you that but it wasn't me. I saw your thread but didn't comment on it because I have no interest in restricting input based on user role.

Back to the issue at hand. This issue started because Heine, a maintainer, was unhappy with the quality of posts on Planet. Gerhard, another maintainer, agreed. If we'd had a few more pile on there's a good chance it would have been acted on with the feeling that there was a general agreement among the maintainers.

Instead, Laura stepped up and suggested that we form some actual guidelines to follow. Rather than having a group of maintainers decide they don't like something and take care of it, we would have community formed guidelines to follow. Given that your firm was one that could potentially have been purged, I'm baffled why you are objecting to adding some transparency and guidelines to the wild west of maintainership.

Michelle

@Michelle- be un-baffled: you just described a situation where 2 people decided what was best for the entire community, without input from anyone outside of the webmaster's queue. The issue I have is that I don't believe it's the webmaster's place to make such decisions, even if it is currently within their powers to do so. If we were talking about Planet Drupal Webmasters I wouldn't care, but the webmasters don't 'own' the Planet, and I specifically reject the idea that any webmaster can tell me, or any other currently listed company, what *not* to put in a post, outside of providing some general guidelines and obvious examples like spam.

Marked #958318: Remove text about "what is not welcome on Planet Drupal" from /about/drupal-planet as a duplicate. Could we try to focus this issue on the actual guidelines? That would be nice for a change. Thanks.

I specifically reject the idea that any webmaster can tell me, or any other currently listed company, what *not* to put in a post

Drupal.org site maintainers are not telling you what to put in your site. AFAIK, site maintainers don't control what you post in your own website; you can even post spam, and no Drupal.org site maintainer will come to remove it for you.
The task of Drupal.org site maintainers is to check the content of what posted on drupal.org, which includes also what appear in Planet Drupal. It's already happened that undesired content appeared on Planet Drupal (by undesired I mean X-rated content), and site maintainers dealed with that.

Follow your reasoning, you should not say to site maintainers how to do a task assigned to them.
If you are saying that adding feeds is not a site maintainer's task, then that is another issue; remember that, if it's not a task for site maintainers, it would be a task for somebody that has the same permission assigned to site maintainers (in other words, it would be a site maintainer under a different name).

RE:

We can (at the moment) do so in a limited number of ways;
- remove feeds we deem not interesting enough for the entirety of the community, or that (in my eyes) abuse the Planet as a free ad forum.
- talk to the content producers and tell them we've noticed a lack of significantly 'interesting' posts before removing feeds.
Given these blunt tools, 2) has my preference.

The communication around these steps is key. The majority of off-topic posts find their way into the planet by mistake. A simple email to blog owner - with a link to a ticket in a webmaster queue - will be sufficient to take care of this.

Repeatedly ignoring guidelines and community norms can and should lead to a feed getting pulled from the planet.

Rules and guidelines are needed, and most rules are not society-toppling affronts against all that is good and decent in the world.

And, fwiw, I'd add a +1 to creating a "Drupal Jobs" feed to keep these posts *out* of the planet.

@Alex: And yet your rail against an attempt to prevent that very thing from happening.

@Heine: No, but you could have. If, say, 5 maintainers/admins had said, yes, let's purge those and you went ahead and did it, no one would think you were acting improperly. In the absence of rules, the maintainers can only follow their best judgment.

That's why we need rules. If the rule is that anything goes, anyone who asks to be added should be granted their request, no one can ever be removed from Planet unless they request it, so be it. That will be the rule that we follow. If the community wants more restrictive rules, then that's what we'll do. But to continue protesting that we should not be discussing the rules that we should not be allowed to create nor enforce them is derailing this issue which is supposed to be about deciding the content of the rules.

So, content anyone?

Michelle

I propose we leave the current rules in place and have a Webmasters BoF (with an IRC channel) in Chicago. The BoF can make some recommendations, which could then be discussed in a ticket.

I think this issue has outlived its usefulness, and that people are getting too caught up in personalities and side issues to make anything resembling progress (and please, someone, prove me wrong here).

But in any case, if we could get stakeholders together to draft/update the text, I think we could get this done quickly and efficiently.

I propose we close this issue, start a fresh new issue without all the bickering about whether we even should be allowed to have an issue, post it on Planet so all those affected by it know the discussion is going on, and see if we can reach some sort of consensus or compromise on what, if anything, we want to regulate about Planet content.

Michelle

I agree with Michelle.

The currently listed rules are not the rules accepted in either this thread nor others, and should be removed while this is discussed. Further, webmasters should refrain from attempting to enforce these non-agreed-upon rules, and should not create issues or send e-mails to site owners until this is resolved.

If those two things can be agreed upon, then I have no problem closing this issue until we can come to a consensus.

So let me get this straight: You are proposing that no activity by anyone be done pertaining to Planet Drupal? I do not think that is feasible or desirable.

Sorry- that wasn't clear, I don't mean "no activity". I mean that we shouldn't be attempting to enforce the items in the "what not to post" section until it's agreed that section should even exist. (for example #980068: Warn about low-quality Hagen Graf feed post using 'Drupal Planet' tag)

-1 to discontinuing to have standards

Let's close this issue, and get some concrete recommendations in place, and go from there.

The current guidelines are pretty mild. From the tone of some comments in this thread, it comes off like these rules threaten people with the confiscation of their first born child if they accidentally include a comma splice in a post.

If the proposal is: Remove the "What is not welcome" section from http://drupal.org/about/drupal-planet, then -1 to that proposal.

I propose that the "What Is Not Welcome" section of http://drupal.org/about/drupal-planet be replaced with the text included below - please edit away, or make alternative suggestions.

Posts that are sent to the Planet should not include

• Press releases.
• "I am having so much fun" posts that don't have much relevance for others. It's great you're having fun with Drupal, but unless what you're sharing can actually help others, or provide great interest, it's not appropriate Planet material.
• Job announcements. Everyone is hiring. There are better places to post that.
• Hiring announcements.
• Posts about something else that just mention Drupal in passing. See requirements regarding Planet-specific feed.

The goal of the planet is to provide a central place for people to share useful and relevant knowledge about their work with and use of Drupal. Posts that are aggregated on the planet should help others learn details about Drupal that they might not otherwise encounter.

I propose that we remove the section completely. There's nothing wrong with creating positive rules and dealing with fringe cases as they arise.

The first, third, fifth, and sixth items need to be removed or (in the last case) seriously modified. At the moment they are not agreed to by the community, and the fact that they remain while we debate this is a serious "dis" to the rest of the community (again, they only remain because Dave Reid locked the content with a webmaster-only filter, about a big of a middle finger that you can give to the broader community that I can think of, imo, and definitely an abuse of power)

And please don't -1 'discontinuing having standards', since that's a big red herring. We're debating the implied right that the webmasters have to police content in *already added feeds* via rules stipulating what planet feeds *cannot* post. At the most basic level there's no way that the business items you listed should be banned, as many have expressed interest in seeing them continue.

If you want a segmented planet, be my guest and create it (heck, I'd be happy to help, as Zivtech already has done with this section), but the planet should stay open and friendly to the developers and businesses that help keep the lights on around here. If you can't figure out how to ignore under 1 post a month, on avg (the avg for job postings), then I don't think feeds are the right content delivery mechanism for you.

I think the continued ad hominem attacks in this issue are unfortunate and uncalled for. That they continue is another indication that this issue should be closed. Attacking individual people and entire groups of people, accusing them of malicious intent, and generally attacking the sincerity of the webmasters and site maintainers, all without any basis except not agreeing with something someone has done -- these are not ways to advance this discussion.

If there are specific language changes to the Planet Guidelines someone would like to propose, please create a new ticket.

If there are general goals of Planet Drupal that someone would like to discuss, please open that discussion in a new ticket or in the forums.

Example of an ad hominem attack (I assume made by me)? Your response (closing a ticket because you perceive someone is making an ad hominem attack, rather than closing it when the issue is addressed) meets the proper definition of the term, since it's not directly relevant to the argument being had.

Please don't close this ticket until there's an actual resolution. I didn't start this thread but (luckily) I was the first affected by it, and I'm not going anywhere until it is actually resolved.

#97 is a starter. From my reading, Alex, you proposed getting rid of all guidelines, which others have opposed. Then you proposed getting rid of all review of existing feeds on Planet Drupal, which others have opposed. There is a general sense among many of the community members in this thread -- who just happen to be webmasters -- that these guidelines might be changed, and that as an evolving community this is something that may come up periodically. But so far there have been no specific wording changes proposed by you, as far as I can see, just broadside attacks not much beyond "this sucks". There is a lot of detail about how upset you are, but no apparent desire or willingness to collaborate with others, no appreciation that the people doing the work are all volunteers giving their time freely as community members.

bonobo in #96 proposed specific language changes, but that was attacked by you in yet another broadside.

The main absence of consensus, as I see it, is on your part, and yet we have yet to see any constructive criticism from you to actually advance this issue, no actionable items, no constructive path forward.

That is why, after some discussion with others in IRC, I closed this particular issue thread, which has strayed wildly and has created a lot of ill will among many community members. While Planet Drupal guidelines certainly can benefit from some revising, perhaps loosening, this issue does not seem to be the vehicle to get us there.

Hence I repeat:

If there are specific language changes to the Planet Guidelines someone would like to propose, please create a new ticket.

If there are general goals of Planet Drupal that someone would like to discuss, please open that discussion in a new ticket or in the forums.

And let's let this mud fight end.

A last note about this issue.

As Alex UA sees this issues as site maintainers versus the normal users, there are three users who have commented here who don't have the rule of site maintainer (or higher); between them, Alex UA is the only one that expressed the opinion of removing the actual rules about what should be added to Planet Drupal. I wonder if he has been elected as representative of all the users who has a feed on Planet Drupal; differently, he is just trying to set his own rules.

So, site maintainers (who normally try to get the consensous of two site maintainers) are not democratic, but he is democratic when he tries to set his own rules without to have the consensous of another user who is not a site maintainer.

I think this says all.

@Laura- as the author of the offending material, you are the last person who should be marking this as closed (unless you are also removing that material from d.o.) Simply put: the current guidelines are not policy, never were, and, if I have my way, never will be. Acting like this is closed simply because you want it to go away is not going to help anything, and is simply escalating an already heated debate.

I don't see this as "site maintainers vs. normal users" I see it as site maintainers assuming more power than they have by making up and posting rules without community consent. I also see a lot of mis-use of changing statuses (for example, trying to close this when it is not resolved in the least) and input filters to prevent the broader community from "interfering" with your not-accepted-rules.

This is not closed until these rules are removed from d.o. You are free to ignore it as you like, but please don't close the issue until there's an actual resolution.

Can someone please look at this thread and tell me where the consensus for keeping the hostile, fight inducing, anti-community "not welcome" text is? I see where it came from (before us 'outsiders' had a chance to get attacked by it), but where is the current consensus that gives the webmasters the right to post these fighting words as official drupal.org policy?

The only offending thing I can see here is a lot of offending behaviour from you, Alex. And the thing close to being locked is your account if you keep that up.

Yeah, right. Don't act like you own this place.

Lock me out and see what it does.

Since you asked me so nicely.

New issue started, Planet readers notified. Let's leave this angry mess behind and work together as a community to do what's best for the community.

http://drupal.org/node/1035184

There is a huge difference between "These rules are unfair and need to change" and "I made a mistake and am pissed off about getting called on it."

The notion that webmasters have "power" is ludicrous. Webmaster have access rights that allow us to do extra work. On rare occasions, doing that work results in a shit-ton of hassle. For Exhibit A, see this thread.

d.o webmasters is volunteer work. People doing volunteer work should decide what kind of guidelines they want to work with. In the same way they should also decide what kind of people they want to work with - maintainership of modules is self-selecting for the same reasons (except for rare cases like malware or long term absence, where it gets escalated to, um, webmasters).

What Alex has been arguing on this thread is that there is 'the community' that should decide what happens, but in the case of Drupal.org there is absolutely no way to define what that community is - is it anyone who visits? downloads Drupal? registers an account? posts a comment? Does the 'community' include spam accounts (presumably there is a real person at the end of that account somewhere and they're technically a user of Drupal.org)? Anyone who helps with docs or modules? With a cvs account?

It's impossible to define, so it's impossible to have a formal quorum when making decisions, apart from the informal conventions that already exist. What you have is some of the people doing the work making decisions, and occasionally people who get pointed there from other sources contributing to those.

There is no formal consensus, democracy or any other kind of decision making process for day-to-day running of Drupal.org (or the code), even though some issues might reach an informal consensus, or use an informal majority from time to time, so trying to invoke one where none exists really doesn't look good.

If you are appealing to the authority of 'the community' and insisting on consensus decision making with that completely undefinable group of people, then you are arguing that users of the service (content moderation on Drupal.org), should tell the providers of the service (the webmasters) what to do.

And yes, 'users' includes you who contributed to the git migration, and me who posts core patches. - In the same way I would not take it nicely if a Drupal.org webmaster tried to block or disrupt a core patch I was working on and used the fact that they're a webmaster and a member of 'the community' to try to pull rank. I'd just tell them to fuck off most likely (although I probably wouldn't have banned them even if it was calling their bluff).

I am all for spats in the webmasters queue and elsewhere, have participated in plenty, and in one case stripped all my own d.o. permissions after a row (search for Kaltura), but the threats and accusations on this issue and the linked ones do not do you any favours and go beyond both healthy discussion or even just a heated row.

@bonobo:

The notion that webmasters have "power" is ludicrous.

Interesting, since one of them banned me for a few hours this morning. How's that for 'no power'?

@catch- remember, we're not talking about letting the webmasters say what happens on d.o., we're talking about restricting the writing of all of those who have had their feeds added to the planet, most of whom never agreed to (or were informed of) these new restrictions. Also- nobody seemed to have a problem with us helping out with the Planet for the redesign, but it would be too problematic to let us have our voices count when it comes to policies around the planet? I just wish I knew that this was how things were handled here before I agreed to help, and I definitely need to review the other areas where we're helping as a company to make sure we're not investing in resources that we are not able to have a say in, Anyway, I have a thread over in the g.d.o. drupal.org policies group asking for clarity on community involvement on d.o...

we're talking about restricting the writing of all of those who have had their feeds added to the planet, most of whom never agreed to (or were informed of) these new restrictions.

To say it differently, we are talking of a single user who didn't like to get a message about an article that appeared on Planet Drupal, and who wants to make valid his own rule.
To make a comparison, it's like somebody who didn't like to get a fine, and tries to make valid his own rule, which states he should not get a fine.

As a matter of fact, there is just a single user who is not a site maintainer who totally agrees with Alex UA, the same person who keeps to talk of community but forgets that community doesn't mean just Alex UA or everybody who is not a site maintainer.

@catch- remember, we're not talking about letting the webmasters say what happens on d.o., we're talking about restricting the writing of all of those who have had their feeds added to the planet, most of whom never agreed to (or were informed of) these new restrictions.

No not really, they can continue to write whatever they want on their blogs, the only restriction is on what gets syndicated to Drupal Planet - since all planet posts are taken from a planet-specific tag it's an easy distinction to make.

Also- nobody seemed to have a problem with us helping out with the Planet for the redesign, but it would be too problematic to let us have our voices count when it comes to policies around the planet?

Yeah I helped out with Drupal 6 but no-one ever asks me about the content on whitehouse.gov or economist.com either, really sucks doesn't it.

It's already been made very clear on this thread that the decisions about actual infrastructure on Drupal.org (including the code base of the website that aggregator/planet falls under), and day-to-day content decisions are done by completely different groups of people (although I'm sure some individuals have cross over).

And no, there is no automatic reason why someone who helps out with the redesign should be able to dictate content moderation policy, it might incline some people to take what you have more seriously, but equally it might incline others to think you're using it as a bargaining chip to hold over the heads of people - people who are also donating their free time to do a job that in the most part boils down to deleting spam and taking abuse.

RE:

nobody seemed to have a problem with us helping out with the Planet for the redesign, but it would be too problematic to let us have our voices count when it comes to policies around the planet?

@Alex_UA - your voice definitely counts. However, there is a big difference between your voice counting and your opinion being the only one that matters.

In this thread and other related threads, you have voiced your opinion. Other people have not agreed with your opinion. Disagreeing with your opinion is not the same as discounting your voice.

@bonobo- as perhaps the biggest (definitely proudest) loud mouth within the Drupal community I can see how I become the issue, but the contention that it is I who is against the consensus with the thread, and not the rules, isn't how I read this thread at all (any maybe therein lies the heart of the problem). From above:
@Laura S in #15

no job postings is a "new" requirement, but arose out of general complaints. I'm agnostic on the issue. Perhaps we could create a Drupal Job Feed category for dedicated feeds just for job postings.

@crell in 26:

I'm only just spotting this thread by accident, but part of the new regs has me concerned. I've of late been writing a post series on general software architecture. While the Drupal community is one of the main target audiences, the content itself is not really Drupal specific in many to most cases. I tend to syndicate such articles to both Drupal Planet and Planet PHP. I expect to have a number of similar articles in the future.

@laura s in (point being the guidelines still have the revisions):

I seem to have jumped the gun in revising the guidelines at http://drupal.org/about/drupal-planet, for which I sincerely apologize.

@webchick in #57

So what I should have said is that once we have something like https://infrastructure.drupal.org/drupal.org-style-guide/prototype/jobs.... featured prominently on the main drupal.org website, along some way to create "featured" jobs that are sticky, coloured differently, and/or show a company logo or whatnot, then I think this policy makes a lot of sense to revisit. But until then, it's too premature, and it's taking away resources from both businesses and Drupal developers looking for work. So in the meantime, we should keep the general "good things to post / less good things to post" idea, and generally handle excessive advertising/self-promotion the same way we handle everything else: by common sense, on a case-by-case basis. Because if we were applying our team's general rule here, I honestly don't think any of the three companies who got slapped for this would've been slapped. And I'm highly against applying rules for rules' sake.

And also @robertDouglas in a related thread:

Now, back to the issue at hand... I totally agree with Alex U.A.'s editing of the post and welcome the end to the stupidly restricted planet. It irks me in many ways that people can't deal with more posts than they're personally interested in. I'm personally interested in every job posting, press release, company advertisement, and self promotion that people write. That's how I stay abreast of where we are as a community. If others don't like it, they should make categories and channels for Planet posts, and webmasters should assume the role of taxonomists, not censors.

@Michelle, you were right in saying that I have made it too much about an "us vs. them" situation- it does feel like that from where I sit (since the text was locked on me and I was banned), but I'm guessing some of/all of the people I quoted are maintainers, and they didn't agree with the policy. Sorry for that mix up- the real problem seems to be that there aren't really any/many mechanisms in place for this kind of consensus within the webmaster group (or within any "body" for that matter).

Just wanted to post a quick update for those who've followed this issue. As part of my work on the Association's Drupal.org Content Working Group, I've been going over the history and have been working on a proposed update that takes the discussions into account. It's up for review now, at #2089285: For Review: Updated Drupal Planet guidelines.

thanks eaton, looks good.