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In lugnet.admin.suggestions, Duane Collicott wrote:
> Please provide a separate group for Brick Fair, such as lugnet.events.brickfair.
> They are forced to use lugnet.events and it has created so much clutter in that
> group that I've had to unsubscribe from it.
Agreed. There are more and more LEGO conventions popping up all the time and
LUGNET isn't keeping up.
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In lugnet.admin.suggestions, Gereon Stein wrote:
> recently we receive quite a number of requests from individual users to have
> their real names and/or profile pages removed from search engine result pages.
Would it be enough to let people change their names to an alias or screen name?
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I’ll admit this isn’t one of my better ideas, but I’ll throw it out there
anyway... Just read an article that
Ma.gnolia Goes Open
Source, But Bookmarking is Dying. Now, I’ve played around a little with
bookmarking. On one hand, it’s a good concept of keeping a list of bookmarked
web-pages on the web, so that I can find information I need from anywhere -- I
read an article, like it, bookmark it from work, then I can reference it when I
get home. Some companies go a step farther, and the more often a
web-page/article gets bookedmarked, it becomes a “top story” -- you can see what
the global zeitgeist is reading. I’d go a step further and do a thumbs-up or
thumbs-down, allowing people to vote positive or negative to an article...
One of the problems of bookmarking web-sites are that they’re too general --
everyone might be reading about John McCain’s new running mate, that’s great for
politics, but what about within the LEGO community? What are people talking
about? I know they’re talking, may not be on LUGNET talking about it, but I
know it’s out there somewhere -- new sub-themes are being talked about over on
Classic-Space, new construction developments are being discussed on
Classic-Castle, Eurobricks have some new set leaks for 2009, etc. It would be
nice to centralize some of that discussion. Blogs do a good job of that, but
LEGO blogs are just as fragmented as LEGO sites...
What would be nice, is do a hobby specific bookmarking web-site -- a service
that LUGNET could offer. Give out HTML/Javascript code that people can put on
their blog/web-site allowing people to bookmark/vote on an article. That
information could be collected like the “Top Stories” sidebar on LUGNET that
would allow people to jump to web-sites within the LEGO community of what’s
being discussed.
If you’re a registered LUGNET user, you can create a collection of hobby
specific bookmarks. You can add user specific tags to bookmarks; and organize
your bookmarks based upon those tags. And then for instance, some of the top
bookmarks tagged “pirate” could be put into a side-bar under “lugnet.pirate”
area. And with a little AI, the system can make web-site suggestions (to users
looking at their bookmarked collection), based upon those tags to help people
find articles/web-site they may not have known about.
Articles can be voted on for “top story of the day” -- HTML snipplet that people
can add to the end of their blog post. If a person likes it, they can vote
thumbs-up. Those votes are collected and processed a little like the “Top
Stories” -- registered user votes count more than an unregistered user vote.
And multiple votes sent from the same IP address; the first vote counts and
follow up votes are ignored. There could be a few sections of “What’s new
today?” and “What popular within the last X-hours/days/year?” (see:
Digg).
I haven’t looked into Ma.gnolia, nor it’s open source code... but I’m wondering
if there’s some ideas to be leveraged there.
--Mike.
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In lugnet.admin.suggestions, Gereon Stein wrote:
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Hi all,
recently we receive quite a number of requests from individual users to have
their real names and/or profile pages removed from search engine result
pages.
snip
My suggestion therefore would be - as is common practice with some of the
more recent communities out there - to implement some sort of “self-service”,
allowing every registered (!) user to set a flag in their profile, deciding
whether or not their profile, real name and other personal information should
be accessible to the public. Note that whatever implementation approach we
may take, availability of such profile and name information must at any time
remain accessible to registered users, since otherwise the whole community
approach would be put to question. However, since search engines work as
everything but a registered user, users deciding on keeping their profile
private will eventually not find their real names or profile contents in
search engines any more. This also applies to posts in the LUGNET newsgroups,
where the web display for unregistered visitors would show some generic text
instead of the real name and email address.
snip
I am very curious as to what you think about these suggestions/proposals. We
would want to find a solution that both helps those of you looking for more
privacy and still keep the community as such functional.
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I think this is a good move in the right direction.
A quick tangent: for those of us who have been around the LEGO community for
awhile now, having our real names out in public on LUGNET has helped me to
associate names of builders to people I meet at LEGO conventions/events. And
I’m also active on Flickr, where people can post pictures and be anonymous to a
certain degree. And for all of my the LEGO ‘friends’ on Flickr, I know half of
them by name and the other half by a username. My only suggestion, if you allow
people to be anonymous to the general public, I’d still enforce a type of
‘username’, so the username is displayed if the user elects to be anonymous.
Now, there is the question of what if a person wants to elect to be anonymous
even within the LUGNET community? Should this be allowed? Is there a
particular need for it? etc. Most on-line communities allow for this...
Usernames are generally associated with an e-mail address or a group of e-mail
addresses. I think the idea behind it at one time was to help cut down on
fraud, but obtaining a new e-mail address is easy enough to do. Being anonymous
is not wrong in of itself, but what’s wrong is fraud, spam-bots, and
griefer. Other on-line communities employ
a “number of postings” system and/or a community “title” given to how active
they are within the community. Generally, people with a higher number of
postings aren’t going around committing fraud -- they might steal Star Wars LEGO
from Target, but that’s another story. It’s the griefer that you can’t write
programs to prevent; but the great thing about a griefer’s personality is that
they get bored quickly and move on.
Personally, I think if given the option, if someone elected to be anonymous even
within the LUGNET community, I don’t think it would prevent the community from
functioning... the community would simple have to adapt.
It’s been awhile since I’ve dealt with NNTP on a programmatic level, but can the
‘username’ be employed when posting to NNTP via the web? For instance, if I
post a response via the web interface, once it’s been submitted to NNTP, can
“Username fakemail@lugnet.com” be used as the poster (assuming the e-mail
address resolves to a valid e-mail address, but might be an internal alias to
/dev/null)? The idea here would be to maintain anonymity even via the NNTP
server. This give the anonymous post an option to remain so, but only if he/she
posts via the web.
It’s archaic, but there are still some bots that spider through NNTP servers
looking for information -- you might be able to shut access down to them
quickly, but once the damage has been done, it’s done. If the above approach
can be implemented, it will at least ease the thoughts of some people...
The other thing to think about is e-mails are sent out to e-mail subscribers...
I would assume they have people’s real names & real e-mail addresses. E-mails
can be intercepted. When are subscriber e-mails generated? I assume it’s a
script ran against the NNTP directory after a message has been submitted (some
are e-mailed immediately, a cron file/script for the queued ones). Assuming
everything is triggered after a message has been submitted to the NNTP server,
if you can implement the above, you’d help maintain an anonymity even if
subscription e-mails are intercepted.
Something else to think about, once a person ‘elects’ to be anonymous, should
something be done about past postings? On one hand, it’s a simple enough
search-n-replace script of all files, replace s/real name/username/ & s/e-mail
address/fake e-mail addres/... but I think the ‘election’ should be a one-time
thing. If you elect to be anonymous, you can not elect to go public again. In
which case, it’s suggested that you create a new/separate/public account.
One other thing, I’d think about changing the sign-in to LUGNET, editing your
profiles, & posting messages via the web to be done over https.
And another thing... :) Most new readers support reading NNTP over SSL & can
require you to authenticate, with a valid username/password. I know it goes
against the open-door policy, but it’s also something else to consider.
I’ve always thought there should be a general discussion area on LUGNET & a
private/or 18+ older area, locked down by username/passwords... A private area
could ran under NNTP over SSL, and the web-pages could be cloned/re-written to
work with this new private area. I know this opens up a whole new can of worms,
but it’s something else to consider. It’s always been my opinion why some LEGO
clubs have moved off of LUGNET to Yahoo Groups or Google Groups is because a
subscription/private area was never offered on LUGNET -- club member wanted to
do event planning without the passing interloper. The idea of permissions and
access rights isn’t fun to deal with -- there are technologies like OpenLDAP to
deal with it -- but it also might mean rewriting your authentication model. One
idea would be to offer the private area, but not have NNTP access to it; maybe
maintain it via NNTP, but prevent those directories from being served up to the
general public via the NNTP server. Just food for thought...
--Mike.
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In lugnet.admin.suggestions, Frank Filz wrote:
> Gereon "Jerry" Stein wrote:
> > Please note that whatever steps we will take, these will only be
> > applicable to _registered_ users (as other users may have posting
> > permissions but do not have a profile to change their settings in to
> > begin with). To put it that way, if you post as an unregistered user,
> > we won't be able to do much about your privacy. Also - apart from
> > emergencies or offense - we will not meddle with the contents of
> > posts, so before hitting the "Post" button, it may be useful to have
> > some brains kick in... I think you know what I mean ;)
>
> Would this affect NNTP reading?
No, because the news server is unaware of membership and profiles. That's why
posting through NNTP always requires the email authentication process.
However, individuals' names and profile data are not an issue with NNTP anyway -
apparently only through the web as that's where people don't want to be found.
Sure, one might get the idea to just archive news for data harvesting purposes,
but that would be pretty tedious and you'd have to know what you are searching
for - plus it wouldn't go unnoticed; I shut down network access for someone
trying to download massive amounts of data recently and am prepared to do so
again if necessary.
Jerry
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Gereon "Jerry" Stein wrote:
> Please note that whatever steps we will take, these will only be
> applicable to _registered_ users (as other users may have posting
> permissions but do not have a profile to change their settings in to
> begin with). To put it that way, if you post as an unregistered user,
> we won't be able to do much about your privacy. Also - apart from
> emergencies or offense - we will not meddle with the contents of
> posts, so before hitting the "Post" button, it may be useful to have
> some brains kick in... I think you know what I mean ;)
Would this affect NNTP reading?
Frank
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Hi all,
recently we receive quite a number of requests from individual users to have
their real names and/or profile pages removed from search engine result pages.
We realize that some of you probably would rather not see their names on such
pages for various reasons that we in turn would not want to discuss here.
Our general approach is that LUGNET is a public platform, so availability of
information should only be limited in places where this is absolutely necessary.
I think most of you are aware that whatever you post here in terms of both
language and content may eventually be searched for and found on the web. This
is part of why LUGNET has become so popular - we do find a lot of people come
here through search engine results, and of course it is vital for LUGNET to keep
it that way.
My suggestion therefore would be - as is common practice with some of the more
recent communities out there - to implement some sort of "self-service",
allowing every _registered_ (!) user to set a flag in their profile, deciding
whether or not their profile, real name and other personal information should be
accessible to the public. Note that whatever implementation approach we may
take, availability of such profile and name information must at any time remain
accessible to registered users, since otherwise the whole community approach
would be put to question. However, since search engines work as everything _but_
a registered user, users deciding on keeping their profile private will
eventually not find their real names or profile contents in search engines any
more. This also applies to posts in the LUGNET newsgroups, where the web display
for unregistered visitors would show some generic text instead of the real name
and email address.
The benefit in turn could be that for logged-in users, we would not have to
spam-cloak email addresses anymore since search engines (and eventually addresse
harvesters) wouldn't be able to see them but registered users could more easily
try to email other users if necessary.
I am very curious as to what you think about these suggestions/proposals. We
would want to find a solution that both helps those of you looking for more
privacy and still keep the community as such functional.
Please note that whatever steps we will take, these will only be applicable to
_registered_ users (as other users may have posting permissions but do not have
a profile to change their settings in to begin with). To put it that way, if you
post as an unregistered user, we won't be able to do much about your privacy.
Also - apart from emergencies or offense - we will not meddle with the contents
of posts, so before hitting the "Post" button, it may be useful to have some
brains kick in... I think you know what I mean ;)
Thanks for your comments,
Jerry
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Please provide a separate group for Brick Fair, such as lugnet.events.brickfair.
They are forced to use lugnet.events and it has created so much clutter in that
group that I've had to unsubscribe from it.
Thank you.
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In lugnet.general, Brendan Powell Smith wrote:
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---an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
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Well played Jedi Master Brendan...well played.
-Dave
ToT-LUG
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In lugnet.admin.suggestions, Brendan Powell Smith wrote:
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Even apart from the worry over some LUGNET posters intentionally driving up
their own “view counts” for egotistical reasons, I would appreciate some sort
of reload-blocking if only to keep myself from accidentally driving up my
own posts’ “view counts” due to over-actively reloading the page just to
check whether anyone else has been viewing the my posts.
I can just see myself thinking, “Hey, every time I reload the page, another
person has viewed my post! It must be really popular!” :)
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I second this thinking.
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1. Latest MOCs - Expand this section to include thumbnails of the five or six
most recent MOCs. I would also swap the positioning of the Latest MOCs
column and the Top Stories column to give the MOCs more prominence.
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I agree that thumbnails would be cool.
I disagree about swapping Top Stories and Latest MOCs. LUGNET is primarily a
discussion site, so the stories should remain the focus. Since the
center-column articles are updated so rarely, I could see reducing them somewhat
- put latest MOCs horizontally across the top, instead of vertically on the
right?
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2. Top Stories - Have this section only include non-MOC announcement posts,
and have posts make it to the Top Stories section by a combination of “view
count”, spotlighting, and how recently it was posted. This will draw people
attention to the most active discussions and/or stand-out non-MOC
announcement posts.
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I think using view count as a criteria wouldn’t work. The postings in Top
Stories have inflated view counts *because* they are in Top Stories, so using
view count would tend re-enforce the standings of the stories already in the
list.
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I’m torn as to whether spotlighting should continue to effect MOC
announcement posts. It almost seems as if the front page needs yet a third
automatically-updating section for recent noteworthy MOCs. Maybe this could
be something that appears automatically at the end of each week in the middle
section of the front page? It would include thumbnails of the five MOCs from
the past week with the highest “view counts” and spotlight ratings?
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That sounds like a very interesting idea.
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I think LUGNET could also use a more obvious way to post new MOCs--one that
walks newbies through it, and encourages inclusion of at least one
reasonably-sized representative image in the post.
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That would be very good. Maybe even a “Announce MOC” icon in the top navbar.
Steve
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In lugnet.general, Gereon Stein wrote:
| |
You know, I actually could have implemented some kind of reload-blocking, but
then again I’m pretty sure the effort wouldn’t pay off in the long run.
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First of all, this is a really nice addition to LUGNET. Thanks, Jerry.
Even apart from the worry over some LUGNET posters intentionally driving up
their own “view counts” for egotistical reasons, I would appreciate some sort of
reload-blocking if only to keep myself from accidentally driving up my own
posts’ “view counts” due to over-actively reloading the page just to check
whether anyone else has been viewing the my posts.
I can just see myself thinking, “Hey, every time I reload the page, another
person has viewed my post! It must be really popular!” :)
I agree that this new piece of data opens the door to lots of other interesting
and useful possibilities. I think “view counts” should be factored into what
makes it into the Top Stories section on the front page, but I would further
suggest a clean separation between MOC announcements and all other types of
posts, and restructuring the two automatically updating sections of the LUGNET
front page as follows:
1. Latest MOCs - Expand this section to include thumbnails of the five or six
most recent MOCs. I would also swap the positioning of the Latest MOCs column
and the Top Stories column to give the MOCs more prominence.
2. Top Stories - Have this section only include non-MOC announcement posts, and
have posts make it to the Top Stories section by a combination of “view count”,
spotlighting, and how recently it was posted. This will draw people attention
to the most active discussions and/or stand-out non-MOC announcement posts.
I’m torn as to whether spotlighting should continue to effect MOC announcement
posts. It almost seems as if the front page needs yet a third
automatically-updating section for recent noteworthy MOCs. Maybe this could be
something that appears automatically at the end of each week in the middle
section of the front page? It would include thumbnails of the five MOCs from
the past week with the highest “view counts” and spotlight ratings?
I think LUGNET could also use a more obvious way to post new MOCs--one that
walks newbies through it, and encourages inclusion of at least one
reasonably-sized representative image in the post. I much prefer the clean,
orderliness of LUGNET to the more “modern” forums, but sometimes I can’t help
but think of LUGNET as long past its prime--an elegant weapon for a more
civilized age.
Wow, now I feel a crazy old hermit. Anyhow, just some thoughts. Glad to see
LUGNET still being worked on and improved!
-Brendan
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In lugnet.admin.suggestions, Michael Horvath wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I'd like to notify you that the default mail-to address when replying to
> authentication messages are deemed improper by Juno webmail. When replying to an
> authentication message, the Ajax software automatically pastes this into the
> send-to field:
>
> news-authentication@lugnet.com (LUGNET Server)
>
> However, it doesn't like the part in parentheses. I always have to trim this
> part if I want to send the message. Is this a problem with the mail software or
> something you can fix?
>
> -Mike
Hi Mike,
apparently your mail client expects the more modern address format of "name"
<address@domain.com>
I have changed the script so that the sender is now:
From: "LUGNET Server" <news-authentication@lugnet.com>
This appears to be standard with all current email clients - the old formatting
should of course still work, but we all know that the greatest thing about
standards is that there are so many of them...
Please let me know if this works for you. If it does (and on the other hand I do
not get reports that other clients fail now - though testing with Outlook,
Thunderbird and Apple Mail and Googlemail should be fairly reliable), I'll
modify other scripts to use the newer address formatting - at least where
reasonably necessary.
Hope I could help,
Jerry
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Hi!
I'd like to notify you that the default mail-to address when replying to
authentication messages are deemed improper by Juno webmail. When replying to an
authentication message, the Ajax software automatically pastes this into the
send-to field:
news-authentication@lugnet.com (LUGNET Server)
However, it doesn't like the part in parentheses. I always have to trim this
part if I want to send the message. Is this a problem with the mail software or
something you can fix?
-Mike
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Aaaahhh, there we go...back to normal. Thank you to Rene or Jerry or whoever it
was that fixed it!
David
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Not sure if this is the proper newsgroup for this...
Has anyone else noticed that the Top Stories on the LUGNET front page haven't
been changing/rolling over? In all my years on LUGNET, I don't think I've ever
seen that happen. The latest story is from 16 days ago.
David
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A suggestion concerning the "People who Want to Sell this set" page in the
guide:
I think it would be helpful if the set price (as shown to the right of the set
picture, third item) were denoted as being the MSRP. Using MSRP may not be the
most explanatory meme, but a number of people who have gone to those pages, seen
the $ amount, have assumed that is the selling price for the people listed
below.
This situation is probably occurring because TLC is steering people looking for
older sets to LUGNET (instead of to an ecommerce site such as BL). These people
are newcomers and do not immediately understand that the price shown is a
historical price and not a current price.
Anyone have a better paradigm of presenting this distinction ?
Ray
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This newsgroup (lugnet.build.military) is great for posting military aircraft,
such as Ralph Savelsberg’s F-117A and
Su-27. But there’s really no suitable place for civilian aircraft.
I know that LUGNET has been in a pretty static state for a long time in terms of
new groups, but this is one area that I think is sorely lacking.
Also note that LEGO has produced several new and re-released sets featuring
civilian aircraft. This is arguably an official sub-theme of town/city.
So can we talk about a new group? And if so where should it go?
lugnet.build.aircraft?
lugnet.town.airport?
other?
FUT: lugnet.admin.general
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I have a suggestion regarding the spam-prevention obfuscation that is applied to
email addresses in http://news.lugnet.com message headers. I think the dummy
phrases should not appear at the beginning or end of the address, only
interposed between characters of the address.
I make this suggestion because when I search for my email address with Google,
the only results whatsoever are on Lugnet news posts. When the dummy text
appears at the end of an address, the address itself appears intact and
perfectly valid. Furthermore, the dummy text is often demarcated by punctuation
characters that rarely appear in email addresses, even if perhaps technically
legal.
As a result, no special effort would be needed for an email harvesting crawler
to recognize these cases. Indeed, my actual email address can be extracted from
those pages Google turns up with the sample regular expression described at
http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html, a popular reference. For
example:
#!/usr/bin/perl
$text = 'From: John Doe <john@doe.com#IHateSpam#> blah blah blah';
if ($text =~ m/\b([A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4})\b/i) {
print "Found address: $1\n";
}
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Running this script, which uses the generic regular expression, reports the
following:
Found address: john@doe.com
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In other words, that particular obfuscation technique does not fool even the
simplest search strategy. Consider the following cases:
- <^SayNoToSpam^john@doe.com>
- <john@doe.com#IHateSpam#>
- <john@doe.SPAMLESScom>
Only the third case will not yield John Doe’s correct email address to the
example script. What I suggest is retaining the last sort of obfuscation method
and abandoning the “prefix” and “suffix” methods. I have no evidence to offer
that this would constitute a real improvement other than the conclusion that the
“obvious” obfuscation methods I’ve identified don’t seem like they would be very
effective.
Thank you for your consideration, and thank you for Lugnet.
Jim
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In lugnet.admin.suggestions, C. L. GunningCook wrote:
> In lugnet.market.shopping, C. L. GunningCook wrote:
>
> > I just don't want to get publicly spanked, for something like Lego insatiability.
>
>
>
> Grrrs@Lugnet
> I am willing to take that spanking for replying to my own post.
(snip)
Perks! @ spankings.
wow - talk like that could almost make you pass out.
now where did i put that strap?
Dont ever forget i can me MORE crass, and even though I am without internet, i
DO have ways to go on line. lets hope this library dont have net nanny. You're a
bad girl and will need to be spanked.... (for those lugnet transgressions of
course.)
Sir.
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In lugnet.admin.suggestions, Ross Crawford wrote:
> In lugnet.admin.suggestions, C. L. GunningCook wrote:
> > I am willing to take that spanking for replying to my own post.
>
> *** SPANK ***
OMG(oodness) in today's episode of "How the Lugnet Turns", the character of Troy
will be played by Rosco. Tune in next week, when we solve the glitches in
formatting and world peace.
Janey "Rather Purple, Red Brick"
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