[AppDB] version: Only display comments section in case version has maintainers

[Hin-Tak Leung]

--- On Thu, 2/5/13, Frédéric Delanoy <frederic.delanoy at gmail.com> wrote:

From: Frédéric Delanoy <frederic.delanoy at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [AppDB] version: Only display comments section in case version has maintainers
To: "Rosanne DiMesio" <dimesio at earthlink.net>, "André Hentschel" <nerv at dawncrow.de>
Cc: "Wine Devel" <wine-devel at winehq.org>
Date: Thursday, 2 May, 2013, 18:53



On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 7:23 PM, Rosanne DiMesio <dimesio at earthlink.net> wrote:



On Thu, 2 May 2013 17:57:16 +0200

Frédéric Delanoy <frederic.delanoy at gmail.com> wrote:



>

> This won't prevent it, but I'm not sure hiding/disabling comments won't do

> more harm than good.



My opinion, based on close to 5 years experience as an active AppDB admin and maintainer, is it will inconvenience a few people, but overall do far more good than harm, for reasons that go beyond simple spam control. The number of unmaintained apps with an active community of commenters is small; in most unmaintained apps, questions posted just sit there unanswered. 


Users seeking help would be much better off posting on the forum.

Of course, but we don't want people to ask the same questions over and over again on the forum.


I thought the whole point of the appdb entry was to centralize information on running apps with wine (comments being common to all versions of the software tested)...





Since Andre's patch (thank you, Andre) merely disables comments for unmaintained apps, any user who really thinks it's vital that the comments appear in a particular entry can make that happen themselves simply by volunteering to be a maintainer. If it's not important enough to someone to put forth the trivial effort required to do that, then it's not important to them, period.



Maintaining/testing app entries may not be so trivial for everyone, and you can't expect everyone wanting to know how to run an app to become a maintainer...Maybe merely disabling *new* (vs all) comments for unmaintained apps would also do the job???



Frédéric

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I am surprised this thread lasted this long. I have three points to make:

- "volunteer" is what it means: "volunteer". To try to make anybody "volunteer" in any activity any manner which is less than whole-heartedly willingly, sounds wrong.

- most people learn to ignore spam one way or any another, whether it comes in e-mails, forums, or through snail posts. Most still scan their spam folder - or at least skim through all the leaflets from snail mails - from time to time, just because the costs of false positive - throwing away something genuinely important, is too high. There is no reason why the AppDB shouldn't work that way. i.e. just deal with the persistent ones, and let the individual readers skip over the occasional rest as they come.

- there are other ways wine users might help other than becoming a volunteer, or even be capable of being one: e.g. supplying "workarounds", or offer financial incentives for app-specific fixes; there are also many reasons why a capable person might not want to be come a maintainer - e.g. one might not want to _commit_ to such a role, or company-policy disallowing such outside commitments - but nonetheless can offer one-off advices  or one-off patches etc occasionally. To ban such exchanges - between people who ask for help and might even offer incentives, and those who can offer help but not willing/possible to commit to a regular role - seem over-zealous.     

Just my 2 $.
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