[tor-project] Have "anything goes" blog post?

[Nick Mathewson]

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 1:45 PM Philipp Winter <phw at torproject.org> wrote:
>
> We have many comments on our blog that are unrelated to the respective
> blog post but still bring up reasonable topics.  To make it easier for
> our users to be heard, why not have an "anything goes" blog post once a
> month?  A user suggested this idea over here:
> <https://blog.torproject.org/comment/288185#comment-288185>
>
> The idea is for users to comment on any topic as long as it's not in
> violation of our blog comment policy (minus the "on topic" requirement):
> <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/community/blog-comment-policy>
> Hopefully, this will give our users an opportunity to talk about
> problems they have, ask us questions, and request features.
>
> How does that sound?  I can draft the blog post and help moderate
> comments but would appreciate a few people helping with that.  I propose
> June 26th -- the last Friday this month.  I suggest giving it a shot as
> a one-off experiment and repeat if it goes well.

Interesting!

Here are some things that I think might make this work better:

  * Actually plan to do this again in the future -- or something like
it.  We can't really call it a "once only" and expect to tell people
"okay, we're never doing this again" and _not_ have  that derail the
whole conversation.  Maybe we should instead

  * We should have a pre-announced close date for this thread.

  * I don't think "anything goes" is necessarily what we want to call
it.  Maybe "anything tor related" or "Open Post"?  "Anything goes"
kind of implies that we won't moderate anything at all for any reason.

  * We'll need several people willing to be moderating and responding
to stuff, probably in shifts.

[SHIFTING TOPICS]

I think we need to look at our moderation policy again.  Right now,
every post's comments are moderated by the post's author, or somebody
they designate.  This makes our moderation policies inconsistent: I
delete everything that is not on-topic, but that captures a fair
amount of people expecting me to have an off-topic conversation
because some other thread allowed it.

OTOH, I feel that I _need_ to block off-topic stuff from threads I'm
moderating, since if I don't, I sure don't have time to respond to it.
If I put it on, then my understanding of our current blog comment
policy is that I need to make sure somebody engages with it.  I'm
better off deleting everything that isn't on-topic.

I'm not sure what the answer is.  I could turn off comments on all the
posts I make, but as we've found out, that just makes everybody else's
posts get full of comments about how my posts are locked down.

Maybe we need to see if we can spin up a cross-post moderation team
for the blog?  I'm not sure.

peace,
-- 
Nick