For Review: Updated Drupal Planet guidelines

I think this looks great!

Fixed missing space

Edited a typo/grammar error.

It is recommended that you trim, or use a summary

IMHO, this should be a MUST, not a MAY.

The https://drupal.org/planet page itself (and most probably some similarly poor feed readers) are exposing the full, untrimmed content ohterwise - hurting readability and discovery.

Every single time I visit that page (including right now), it contains some full-length posts. Site owners who properly trimmed their summaries inherently appear to be less relevant, due to the full-length posts that are dominating the page. That is wrong.

tag

Thanks for the effort on this.

Regarding trimming/summary: There is this long standing issue slightly favoring trimming (if I remember correctly) #299884: Implement Aggregator Item Length module on Drupal.org
Anyways: I +1 trimming.

Regarding the need for comments: #1940276: Drupal Planet Guidelines regarding comments
I can live with a MAY but personally would prefer a MUST. We want to prevent even more marketing and fluff and I think the ability to discuss a post is very important (or to post corrections). But this isn't a deal-breaker here.
In any case I would prefer that we point out our encouragement to enable anonymous comments or use a easily accessible system like disqus (i.e. no requirement to log into a site specifically).

A highly problematic point imho is this:

it violates the Drupal Trademark and Logo Policy

Maybe we need only some advise to webmaster (as this proposed document is outward facing) how to handle this but in the past this point has been a bitch to manage. It seems to be general webmaster policy NOT to police trademark issues as most of us are not qualified enough to do so AND we are not the instance to enforce the trademark as we are not the trademark holders.
I have studied law for a couple of years (in Germany but also with focus on international law) so I can handle legal mumbo-jumbo but even I have to say that the specifics of this licence/trademark stuff can be VERY itchy.
I propose we (at least internally) make it clear that this is not up to webmaster review (for the most part because we are not qualified to). Instead we remove a feed IF the trademark holder notifies us about a misuse. This would shift the conflict to the instance which holds the trademark (and they can contact the offender directly). As said before: I don't think we as webmaster can handle this professionally enough.

Unless webmasters (or some specific person/group is delegated with authority to enforce the trademark) I am agreed with #5 re trademark: let the trademark owner/deciders contact us if their is a violation, not the other way around.

I suggest removing the part about trimming. It's a very contentious issue given that the feed is used in multiple ways by multiple people. It can only be solved in a way that pleases everyone if it's full feed to start and trimmed client side.

The g.d.o jobs feed is not for resumes, so that should be removed. The g.d.o/jobs page is also mentioned twice - probably once is enough :)

Agreed with #5 on trademark issues.

For comments, perhaps generalize it to "some form of reader feedback" as a way to discourage press releases? That still leaves it open to Drupal comments, Wordpress comments, Disqus, a "Tweet us" button, whatever.

On trimming, I don't know how many people read Planet via the web site vis RSS. I read via RSS and virtually never see the site, so untrimmed articles are actually better for me. For people viewing on the site, though, I agree that shorter is better.

Is there no way we can do the trimming on our end for HTML display, but let through whatever people post for RSS purposes? That seems like a completely reasonable content strategy thing to do... :-)

Agreed on trademark.

I also think we should encourage people to use full posts but it is not required. It's actually *very* easy for us to fix on Drupal.org either using a *new module* (https://drupal.org/project/aggregator_item_length) or a simple template_preprocess() hook in the drupalorg.module. I encourage full posts in RSS because Drupal.org itself re-publishes its RSS feeds using the full text and not teasers. So people on Planet would get more value if they provided the full post, to those that read the Planet via RSS.

Re 1., the taxonomy prescription seems extraneous. There are many ways to make a Planet-only feed. (E.g., using flag.)

Re 4., for me, trimming gets in the way. It forces me to click through. It's easy enough to scroll through something I'm not interested in. Teasers otoh don't tell me if the post is even going to get to the points I'm interested in. If the goal is to drive traffic to sites, great. If the goal is to disseminate knowledge, untrimmed is better imho.

Re 5., I think it's fair to require comments. I do not believe that it is reasonable to require or suggest that people allow anonymous comments.

Also, the guidelines seem to be in conflict regarding case studies:

Content that's great for Planet Drupal :

• ...Case studies that highlight how Drupal was used on a project.

Case studies explaining how a particular Drupal site was built can be submitted in the Drupal.org Case Studies section.

In the past, case studies have been frowned upon in the Planet, unless it was focused on a particular module or issue. Portfolio items in general have been discouraged. I'm not sure I have a strong opinion either way about this, but I wanted to note the ambiguity and history here.

The rest looks great imho!

it does not meet the content guidelines stated above

this sentence is not clear legally.. Content guidelines are scattered in 3 sections..

warning vs removal
I know it is a case by case decision, but still there is no rule in the document when the site will be removed for sure.

feed may be removed

- I think we can say the feed will be removed without discussion if it "contains spam, is hacked or posts are offensive".
- repeated warnings should be also automatic removal. This should be written in the guidelines as nobody will get removal just for posting a job announcement, and we need to make sure he will not continue doing so.

can appeal by creating a followup issue

I don't really understand why to create a new issue, as the issues are public and the blog author might already commented in the original complaint.

their decision will be final.

I would simply remove this part, as this part can't be really enforced. I believe a 1 year ban from planet should be the maximum penalty for any site which posted at least 2 appropriate posts about Drupal (which is a must for getting to planet). I don't agree with final decision here.

This is a reflection of the nature of an "issue" on Drupal.org

From a ticket perspective I agree with you. From a practical perspective...it's easier to get attention of interested parties if you re-open an existing ticket. How about something in-between: open a new issue but link to it from the old issue. Kind of like #928092-115: Update and clarify Planet Drupal guidelines.

re #13
If there is an issue with an existing feed it is definitely easier and much more practical to reopen the old issue where the author of the feed is subscribed to. It is quite annoying for me hunting down maintainers of feeds added many moons ago without having a original issue to get at least a profile link to contact a person. In the last months since I've been heavily involved in Planet management I found it very convenient to reopen an issue if problems came up.
Couldn't we handle these issues like those for marketplace listings? Those are also used as the one-stop-shop for all issues regarding a listing page (e.g. if a page hasn't been updated in the last twelve months the issue status is changed from closed/fixed to needs work). I personally appreciate the ease of use of this approach.

About the "final decision": Doesn't sound right to me. I am with Pasqualle on that although I understand the meaning of it. We need to clarify when a banned feed can reapply.

"Warning vs Immediate Removal" -> what eaton proposes in #12

We've taken the previous discussions at #928092: Update and clarify Planet Drupal guidelines and #1035184: Form a community consensus on Planet Drupal guidelines into consideration while working on the update, and believe it reflects the concerns of the participants in those discussions as well as explaining the principles behind the few rules that do exist.

This seems like a great and reasonable process if a little incomplete. Was anyone else consulted directly? Who do you hope will manage the queue on an ongoing basis?

To cut to the end of those questions: it seems important in this process and in our ongoing governance processes to solicit feedback directly from the people currently doing work to help ensure they are willing to continue doing work (unless there is someone else who has volunteered to do the work based on this set of guidelines).

So, here is a query and the results of who is active in planet drupal queue in the last year:

select count(1), c.uid, u.name, component from node n INNER JOIN project_issues pi on n.nid = pi.nid INNER JOIN comments c on n.nid = c.nid INNER JOIN users u on c.uid = u.uid WHERE pi.pid = 1848824 and component = 'Planet Drupal' AND timestamp > unix_timestamp() - 60*60*24*365 group by c.uid, u.name, component order by count(1) desc limit 10;

+----------+---------+-----------------+---------------+
| count(1) | uid | name | component |
+----------+---------+-----------------+---------------+
| 509 | 412465 | dddave | Planet Drupal |
| 252 | 180064 | System Message | Planet Drupal |
| 63 | 383424 | mr.baileys | Planet Drupal |
| 24 | 120058 | codi | Planet Drupal |
| 23 | 36762 | greggles | Planet Drupal |
| 18 | 55077 | kiamlaluno | Planet Drupal |
| 14 | 1511704 | friendlymachine | Planet Drupal |
| 14 | 13009 | silverwing | Planet Drupal |
| 10 | 999848 | tvn | Planet Drupal |
| 9 | 588256 | yomex4life | Planet Drupal |
+----------+---------+-----------------+---------------+

So, dddave - thank you so so so so much! You are the only person more prolific than that amazingly consistent and productive System Message guy ;)

Thanks. ;)

The backlog in the Planet queue was what got me involved with the webmaster team in the first place as I wanted to help out. For the foreseeable future I won't leave.

I personally think the discussion here in this issue has addressed some points which I would like seen at least taken into consideration before finishing the new guidelines (which overall seem like a good improvement).

One point that isn't well reflected so far and I don't know how practical we could bring something like this into the guidelines is "Content Quality". Since I took a dive into this stuff I had more than a handful requests that would technically qualify but that I rejected for lack of quality. For the most part these were very low level articles obviously aimed at not tech savvy customers. Another quite common issue is that the topic of an article covers an already very well covered topic (updating a drupal install for example or basic drush commands). So far bringing up my objections either resulted in simply not following-up the issue (mostly by companies that obviously wanted to get on the Planet for promo reasons) or agreeing and resubmitting new content. So from a practical standpoint we don't need to write a "quality" requirement down as nobody has made a big stink so far. Just wanted to mention this.

So, is something happening with this?

Cross-linking.

just poking to see if it is still alive

I don't think that burden would be to heavy to carry.

We definitely need more hands on deck for other tasks, esp. sophisticated tasks like case study reviews.
Creating better anti-spam meassures or eleminating the not-a-spammer process would free up a lot though (that as a side-note).

http://www.mediacurrent.com/blog/meet-erin-bush

Can please anyone tell me what is this post doing on the Planet? Or how can one promote his/her career switch on Drupal Planet?

P.S. Please tell me where is it appropriate to ask such questions, if this issue is the wrong place.
P.P.S. I don't know Erin in person so by default I assume she's a great person. But I think that such posts are a bit inappropriate for the Drupal Planet. I can see no value there except for Mediacurrent marketing.

#2226155: Problems with content on MediaCurrent's feed.