Re: Notes systems

On Tuesday, August 19, 2003, at 08:45 AM, Mehdi Achour wrote:

Ronald Chmara wrote:

On Sunday, August 17, 2003, at 08:56 AM, Mehdi Achour wrote: It tends to vary over time. When people are very active, the notes are well maintained. Sometimes people become less active. From what I can see, I think the manual is still totally flooded with confusing, contradictory, and poorly written notes. As far as "who is allowed to manage a given page of notes", I think the bare minimum should be 1. Those who know PHP, and the note subject, well. 2. Those who have experience with writing PHP's documentation (preferably). If notes editors are also writing documentation, *most* of the good notes can be deleted as they are integrated.

And what about an abusive note ? Do we need to know how work the domxml extension to delete some non-related note ?

Interesting. I would say: You *must* know everything about the domxml extension to *know* if the note is unrelated. If it was abusive and unhelpful, delete.

I wasn't talking about the skills needed to moderate the notes, but this can also be discussed. I was objecting for allowing other ppl (not memebers of the PHP team) to moderate the notes as I've seen that it was dicussed.

/me checks out the php team list A good 200+ people. Most of the people *know* their work. If an Oracle expert <mumble> starts slamming MySQL <mumble>, corrections will happen. I, personally, have not seen a great loss in the notes. Perhaps some examples would help.

2) Reasons for suppression : As approached in my first mail, we see from time to time abuses in the moderation,

Rather than adding to the workload for each note, how about correcting the actions of the abuser themselves?

You mean posting the note again if it was deleted ? Who will take care ?

If someone wanted to abuse the system: Everytime a MySQL fanatic posted a message that MySQL can do transactions... a PostgreSQL fanatic could delete it.... Eventually, php.net would see the cvs churn. I hope.... Uhm... HEY! OVER HERE!

Would that be a more effective solution than adding a greater workload to a simple system?

A smart note, which maybe deserve to be integrated to the manual lost, without any understable reason :

     "note xxxx was deleted from yyyy by zzzz@php.net"
   Why ? did "zzzz" read it all ? does he just want to show that he's "taking care" ?

There are a lot of valid reasons for deleting notes... ;-) If one cannot *trust* in someone else's competency to manage the notes, adding a bunch of categories that they "check off" will not fix that problem. Rather than "abusing" without a reason, they can simply "abuse" *with* a reason, valid or otherwise.

Abusing with an invalid reason is more critical then abusing with no reason at all. Having the need to supply a reason will *maybe* make the abuser think twice before deleting the note.

LOL. Ok, this is cultural.

One more occasion to fit our readers needs is lost here.

    some notes disserve to be on the users notes, without being deleted nor integrated.

Can you provide some examples? I perceive the optimal manual as a manual without *any* notes. If the manual is good enough, no additional notes and explanations would ever be needed. So, if a page *has* notes, that is a sign that more effort should be applied to improving the documentation... to a point where PHP no longer requires "external help".

For example, a trick on the mysql_num_rows page showing the use of COUNT() (mysql function) to get the number of records in a table instead of doing mysql_num_rows(mysql_query('select * from foo'));

That's about MySql magic, not PHP.

This can not be integrated to the manual (or we'll have to introduce all the optimization stuff) but is really usefull for newbies (when I've started PHP/MySQL I was using the bad way =D) there's a lot of examples of this kind.

That's not about PHP.

    A new note is posted :
      - if the note should be deleted (deleted, not rejected as described by the current howto) we do

[snip]

This is missing a large number of "other" reasons for deleting/rejecting notes, here are some reasons from poking around notes tonight: 12. Coding-101-notes: Notes that mention that things like "closing quotes" matter. (Uhm...) (etc.)

nice shot :)

Delete a few hundred a night. Fun. Real fun. ;-) -Bop Ronald Chmara Ronin Professional Consulting LLC 678-530-9542 "They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction ." --Janet Reno