Has anyone checked out drupal (drupal.org).  It has everything we would need, is much more mature, and has a very robust comment rating system.

It also has a book module, that would allow people to be authorized to contribute to books, something like a wiki I guess.  It can also track changes to articles, comments, the book, etc...

As you have surely noticed by now, I have made several small changes throughout the site.

First of all, you'll see that I have dropped the "dispatches" terminology in favor of articles.

Second, I've setup several new sections and I'm working on some different topics as well.  You'll see those when you write an article.

Third, I finished a pretty big update of the FAQ, so you'll probably want to go through that (again).

Fourth, I have made some changes in some of the parameters.  For instance, at least three votes are now needed before a score for a comment is calculated.  I've done a similar thing with the submissions in an effort to get more feedback on each article before it moves out of the queue.

As you know, I've setup a poll re: the license for the site.  Be sure to read the comments before voting!

There was a question somewhere about the deeplinking policy.  My intent is to allow deeplinking.  I'll be working on the SOP's to clarify that.

There was a question about putting a limit on the intro text (to avoid excessively long articles appear on the front page).  This can be done and I will probably institute it.  I've got to modify the article submission form though so authors will be aware of the limit and what may happen if they exceed the limit.

Thanks to everyone for participating!!!!

I understook logbook entries to basicly be personal blog (diary-like) entries that did not go through any sort of review and approval process.  So why was the entry for mitmosnar in the review reports queue in the first place?

I felt the particular post was more personal in nature than what is appropriate for front page "article" material.  The post was, however, in my opinion appropriate for a personal logbook entry.  I voted zero (abstain) on the article, because I didn't want to inadvertently affect his overall rating status.

I also wondered how the heck he got a logbook entry to go through since every time I try I get an error message.  I then noticed that under the "Submit Dispatch" link you can, in fact, select logbook as the section/topic.

I'm not going to line-by-line your post because I don't have time, but here are some things that struck me from it.

> Groklaw is a SPoF because there is only one PJ.

The point is only Grok can serve what Grok serves, and that is by deliberate fiat from PJ.  That is why it is a "single point" unlike other sites which have their place in history in Google or the Wayback Machine, even if they are snuffed out.  Compared to getting the stuff archived and searchable, the fact that her deletions might no longer stick (and this is the problem, archival undermines her ability to silence people) does not seem to me relevant.

> And this is why I happily accept her
> decisions. I feel the cure plus side effects
> is better than than the disease.

I did not ever suggest PJ should be replaced at Grok: it's her show.  What I have said is that PJ needs to be routed around.  The reliance on one site and one person is unhealthy, particularly with the strange worshipping stuff that goes on, and the consequent ability for one person to suppress whatever they like from general view.  IP-Wars is increasingly looking like a really healthy additional site.

> The side effects of this policy are heavy.  
> Again, I happily agree with her decision,
> because I agree with the positives; even if I
> mourn the negatives.

Well there are people that disagree with PJ's judgement, and that will therefore not react with the same sanguinity.  PJ's fiat extends only to Groklaw.  If you are "happy" having everything she disagrees with nuked before you see it and make up your own mind, and with no way to check what she is nuking, you will be happier at Grok, that's all that can be said, except to observe that you gave up your freedom to make your own mind up very cheaply and "happily".

Maybe you could have a muse about the possible 'good' reasons for banning Deep Linking, I didn't see it mentioned.  I have come up blank trying to think of any.

> make use of such comments as a primer or "proof" in an article.

Paid-fors like Enderle will find a way to stick the knife in one way or another.  Because the "solution" to this concern over there is to filter all comments through PJ's worldview, the resulting distortion leaves ONLY PJ's worldview.  This totalitarian state of affairs is a far more damaging situation for FOSS than some guy posting an planted post (which would anyway garner a long thread of angry rebuttals, proving nothing for the planter).

> I think she also felt that she didn't need the additional traffic that SE's

Has she said this?  Because you can control search engines' request frequency in robots.txt to be as slow as you like between fetches.  Given the number of pageviews on Grok, a search engine would be lost in the noise anyway.  So this is not a problem.

> She may have other equally good reasons. Do
> you trust her? I feel that in every situation
> that has been observed where PJ has made a
> decision that seemed wrong at the time. Time
> and events have proven her call was correct.

No, I don't trust her.  You sound like you have never come into conflict with her, so I don't doubt you'll go on thinking that you are dealing with the all-seeing, all-wise PJ that you can have faith in -- and that's the word your're looking for, not trust, you have been talking about blind, religious, 'happy' faith in her decisions.  Meanwhile what I have been getting is the fallible, trenchant, overreacting, mistake-making, shrill, unable to apologize bully PJ, so naturally my views changed radically from yours (where they pretty much started, by the way).

> those here are underminding all the work

This would not only pertain to potential vulnerabilities for SCOX, but a slot like this on IP could also "deep dive" into other equally "friendly" companies. Tedious work, but not something I've seen on any other site.  

The moderation I believe, however, would have to be astute: facts, just the facts, but nonetheless rewarding.

How about a forum where registered users are free to start a thread on anything? Maybe turn off moderation for the lounge? Maybe allow Potential Recruits in read-only?

1. Stories are late in being published compared to other sites. This maybe because the site hasn't built up a critical mass yet. It would be good to have a way of fast-tracking breaking news articles to the front page.
   
2. To build up the community the site needs a good slashdotting (resources permitting). So whenever a great article comes up people should submit the story to Slashdot (normally you'll need a breaking-news article for this, so it's related to point 1).
   
3. Could you also have a Bulletin Board style chat site associated with IP-Wars and linked to the front page? This would allow more Yahoo-style open discussion not necessarily associated with articles.
   
4. Would be nice if you could post images in the comments section, not storing them on your site but being able to link to them on other sites and having them display in the comment (i.e. allow <IMG> HTML).
   
5. Split the grok*/OSRM articles into two, one for Groklaw and one for OSRM (I believe someone else already suggested this).

So poking around a bit, here is a post by Tim that I know I rated at 4, and it says so when I view the thread, but the rating says (none/1):

http://www.ip-wars.net/comments/2004/11/8/144642/546?pid=7#8

Is there a problem or is there something else going on I don't yet understand?

The page I was typing the MPAA story on had the poll instructions right through the story entry field. I literally couldn't see some of the text I was entering and I ended up with a sentance fragment.

There are Dispatches or now Articles, which go through voting and if passed reach the front page.

If on submit Dispatch (now Article),  if you select category "Logbooks" it still goes through the vote process, but when passed will not show up on the front page, but will still be visible to anyone who clicks "Logbooks" on the menu.   This is more or less what I really wanted for my review of the GL review; somewhere to provide a place for discussion but best not to clutter the front page.   Now that I know how it works, I would suggest that "small topics" including, for example interesting threads from SCOX or CKX be posted here.

Personal Logbooks aka Diaries are evidently not working yet.  As I understand you will post them without going through the vote process.  What users will have to do to see your diary, I do not yet know.

It does make it easy for anyone who wants to spend the time to try to identify trolls or those trying to game the system.

I also like that before articles are posted, you are able to see how has voted and how.  Is there a way to get at the article votes after the article itself has been posted?

Who owns the copyright to publically available court documents, and can anyone apply "their own" licensing (CCL etc...) to them anyway?

I would like to see the display of the documents arranged in some sort of tree-like arrangement, where the case would be at the top, counter claims and such would be major branches, motions and depositions would branch off from the correct place, etc...  You could drill down into particular areas to see what is going on.  What would be really nice is to color code the entire thing, branches that resolved with a denial are red, branches that resolved affirmatively are green, unresolved is yellow (colors used for example only, no disrespect for the color blind intended).

Kind of like how tuxrocks does it with the checkbox expansion, but extend the idea to be more useful...

Notice: Site license changed on Nov. 12, 2004 at 11:18:00 EST.

For example:

Review Hidden Comments (3/1 New)

I think this is one area of the board we all need to keep our eyes on, both to be fair and to prevent anyone abusing the system.

1. When I have the article open in a mixed-display mode, if I rate a post, the screen refreshes automatically, but positions itself at the top of the article rather than at the comment. Anyway to fix this? (I am using IE from work; don't know if this behavior is IE-specific).

2. Doesn't the search function search free-for-all comments?

First, it would be nice to have a "sticky" link on the front page to the comments page.

Also, I've been trying different options for how the comments are displayed. For the regular articles, I like to have the comments nested, with the oldest first. But in the free-for-all, I think it would work better if the default more closely resembled the Yahoo board: flat, with newest first. Also, what happens when the comments number into the thousands? There should be a limit (maybe user-set limit) to the number that appear on a page.

The only other thing that may need changing is where the comments appear. The comments show up below the bottom of the nav boxes on the right, and you have to scroll downpage to see the beginning. Somebody could easily think there are no comments there. Can they be moved up top alongside the nav boxes?

Thanks, Jeff, for the great site! Now if warmcat's pacerbot could report here, we would have little need for the Yahoo board(s).

Also, I just noticed that when I went to preview this comment, I was shown the "comments reminder" text ("First of all, please review our Standard Operating Procedures. We have no desire to own your comments....") rather than my own comment.

And I keep hitting the send password button when I want to log in.  Could somebody come over here and smack me until I learn to read?  Or, could the login button be bigger / closer and the send password button smaller / further down?  

It looks like members get one vote per poll, what about PR's?

If they really want to post anon let them logoff.

http://www.groklaw.net/comment.php?mode=display&sid=20041121063628466&title=The%20Issue%20Of %20Authorial%20Attribution%20Will%20Not%20Go%20Away&type=article&order=ASC&hideanonymous =0&pid=243455#c243648

The beginning of the post is:

Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, November 28 2004 @ 05:12 PM EST

PJ, my groklaw account (mikey) was deleted without warning or explanation, in spite of two emails from me asking you for an explanation. When I posted these comments to groklaw, I understood the site as a collection to be licensed under a non-commercial CCL. In my mind this made the goals and operation of groklaw in line with the nature of other free/open source related sites. In light of recent clarifications of the licensing policies of groklaw (which I view as changed, not clarification) and the removal of attribution from my copyrighted comments, I would rather my comments be deleted in their entirety.

For the rest, feel free to contact MathFox with any fully formed solutions, or better yet, go to Geeklog and when you code the solution, offer it to the world.  We're all in the same boat.

In this reply, I informed her that I did just that, coded a solution and submitted it to geeklog.  It is now available as a geeklog Add-In called glrevive.

Right now the display is a bit too easy to miss, maybe something in the Main Menu box?

For example a user on CKX was able to get the following info:

IPW stats
by: data_pipeline     12/06/04 01:09 pm
Msg: 6084 of 6108

As of earlier today:

3200 total comments
2802 by registered members
398 by 'potential recruits'

The top ten posters account for:

88% of all comments (2282 comments - including all 'potential recruits' grouped as one account)
70% of all comments (1966 comments) minus 'potential recruits'

Five missing or deleted account id's:

11
54
62
109
113

55% of all registered users have posted less than two total comments.

72% of all registered users have posted less than five total comments

We should just provide the info and any explanation necessary.

Can you move my prior articles to their appropriate sections?

And...

Change it to something like:
<head1>Changes/Notices<head1>
Then use the same schema the rest of the front page uses.

Yet interestingly, they stopped posting between 12:23 and 1:42.

Hmm, the PR's all took a lunch break at the same time.

Scoop takes a bit of getting used to, and people coming from message boards with such as Y! or sites with no user moderation may find the options daunting and be put off.

Gathering some of the posts from CKX on the Yahoo vs IWP ratings thread would be a good start, warmcat & heimdal had some good explanations.

As we have discussed before, one of the problems with Potential Recruits is that you can't tell one PR from another.  As a result it can be difficult to follow a discussion because you can't tell who is responding to whom.

One suggestion was to publish the PR's IP address, or a partial IP address.  This suggestion raised obvious concerns about preserving anonymity, and was apparently (and appropriately) dropped.

Another possibility is to use a one-way hashing scheme to mangle the IP address into something unrecognizable but reasonably distinct.  For example: add the four numbers of the IP address, divide the sum by 997 (or some other suitable prime number), and take the remainder.  The result could be used to tag the particular PR as distinct from other PRs without compromising his or her anonymity.

MD5 is a more robust hashing scheme but it is probably overkill for a four byte field.

This idea is not foolproof.  Occasionally two unrelated IP addresses may hash to the same value.  A given PR may post from multiple IP addresses for any of several reasons.

Had a look at the updated FAQs and have couple of comments.

The example screenshot you use to explain comment details probably needs to be changed since it's one dealing with ratings and is misleading (0 != none)

Is seems to me that the option to not rate sometimes is the fairest (e.g. Dupes, mistakes etc.) is it worth mentioning that in the rating section?