RE: [pear-webmaster] I should maybe point out here..

Hi Dan, It's an already-committed idea at present - my mail must've passed Martin's mid-air! I've prepared a patch for the account_edit.php form, which Helgi now has and which he and I are planning to road-test later today. It has health warnings all over the Zend-ish area about 'you don't have to do this!' and 'tick here to remove your profile from zend.com!' etc etc. Hopefully this will appease those people who aren't terribly happy about the idea, and please those people who _are_ happy about the idea. I'm hearing a lot of suspicion about marketing ploys, some of it quite vocal, so I'll answer it here and save myself a few more irc conversations on the subject. The closest we get to a marketing ploy of any kind is in the certification flag, but that's more there for the future than for now - sooner or later the Zend Certificate will be considered an industry standard, and of course at Zend we're in a prime position to check that people aren't lying about their status that way. Changing the wording on the form from 'Zend certified?' to 'PHP certified?' doesn't make a lot of sense because there are some strange ways whereby someone could claim they were PHP certified, some of which are genuinely ratified and some not. I think that if this works as the people-showcasing area it's intended to be, it's perfectly justifiable to have that flag as part of a profile that is, by popular demand, more or less geared toward job-hunting. At the Zend end, if any field isn't filled in, it will be silently ignored. A plea for privacy (tick a checkbox) means that your profile page simply says you requested privacy and gives no details at all, not even your real name or the packages you maintain. The curious will have to go and look you up on pear.php.net instead. Outside of that, all I wanted was a community database that would more or less look after itself (says she as she ploughs through a couple of hundred core PHP/ZE accounts that don't do that thing). People within the inner community generally like the option to have their profile on a long-established PHP-related site, and people from the wider community like to be able to look people up easily. We're not exactly running orkut here. We aren't keeping backups of old sqlite files etc etc - well okay maybe one in case of a server crash, but it's updated as often as the live one. We aren't going to keep track of old personal information that someone updated or decided to delete. We aren't collecting email addresses - you have to go to pear/pecl.php.net to find those. Then again, we're the Mossad of web-engineering of course ;) I keep forgetting that part - I used to be considered part of the community as long ago as July. Cheers, - Steph > -----Original Message----- > From: Daniel Convissor [mailto:danielc@analysisandsolutions.com] > Sent: 10 September 2004 06:18 > To: Steph > Cc: PEAR Webmaster List > Subject: Re: [pear-webmaster] I should maybe point out here.. > > > Hey Steph: > > On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 06:39:15PM +0100, Steph wrote: > > Following a discussion with Pierre on irc, it seems there's no > > consensus at the PEAR end about the extra info fields anyway > > Martin and I have provided our opinions here on the record. You're > willing to go the route of integrating the data into the existing pear > account user interface. So, this seems like the route to go. If > Pierre disagrees, he should speak up here, on the record, and try to > convince us that it's a bad idea or he has a better idea. > > --Dan > > -- > T H E A N A L Y S I S A N D S O L U T I O N S C O M P A N Y > data intensive web and database programming > http://www.AnalysisAndSolutions.com/ > 4015 7th Ave #4, Brooklyn NY 11232 v: 718-854-0335 f: 718-854-0409