moderation & editorial

There was a message sent via the contact tab asking to fix the Peru group alias as pauthauto just made a bunch of weird characters. I changed to http://groups.drupal.org/perú

Michelle

This morning, a company looking to hire a Drupal developer posted to two groups, including the Contributed Module Status group that I manage.

Although I have VERY CLEAR language in the group's description that job postings are NOT allowed per the following...

(NOTE: This group is NOT for job postings and any posted here will be removed. It is suggested that you place your job postings in the Consulting and Business group. Repeat: jobs posted here will be removed.)

...job posters often do not visit each group when posting via the Submit Job form to see if any group they're posting to has special rules on what to post and what not to post. Hence, they post job forms to groups they shouldn't be posting, as in the case of the Contributed Module Status group, a group with over 1600 subscribers. The result is that I email the job posters on average about once a week to remove their job form. I email them because I don't want to just remove their job form from my group because then they won't learn and I don't want to just delete their job form either because I think that would be rude.

Although I highly support the entrepreneurial spirit, I'm very much against groups.drupal.org becoming saturated with groups that really aren't about discussing Drupal and instead are self-serving.

Here are two examples I came across in the moderation queue this morning and they appear to have little, if anything, to do with Drupal:
http://groups.drupal.org/m-s-public-relations
http://groups.drupal.org/kolb-net-works

Would it make sense to spell out in clearer language that g.d.o is not for an individual, a business, the government, a non-profit, etc., to set up a group whose focus isn't Drupal?

The create a group link contains the following but perhaps it's not clear or specific enough?

The focus of your group should be drupal related discussion. We don't host groups that discuss other topics like politics and fundraising. Drupal can be popular for powering sites like those, but thats beside the point. We discuss Drupal here, exclusively.

And if the Drupal Association wants to help generate funds by allowing advertising in a directory to which we can redirect those folks who want to advertise, I would support that. I just don't want a bunch of clutter here on g.d.o. by folks who are really doing nothing more than advertising.

I've installed a new spam module and removed CAPTCHA.module. The new module analyzes the contents of comments and node submissions and assigns a spam score. If the module is unsure, the user may see a CAPTCHA. But usually, the module just allows the right stuff proceed without challenge.

Please let me know if you see spam or if you hear of authors getting stopped incorrectly.

Update: The new spam module is in alpha testing right now, and I'm not able to discuss its particulars.

This post wasn't clear so I mailed the guy to ask if it had any Drupal work in the job. He said no, that it doesn't. On the add job page it just says "thanks for your interest in supporting the drupal open source movement by hiring drupal developers" which kind of hints that these should be Drupal jobs, but doesn't state it outright (also s/drupal/Drupal).

I committed new code to OG today and rolled it to this site. We are now capable of completely private groups. Although we always have supported private content in a group, the group homepage has always been public. Thats not so anymore. A group can choose to be private now. I don't expect much use for that here, except for private planning groups like Drupalcon, Google Summer of code mentors, and so on.

Please let me know if you see funny behavior related to posting content or creating groups.

Again, in case anyone wants to undo what I did.

I have unpublished the new http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-opensource-emr group, because we already have a very underutilized http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-health group.

Edit: And I have informed the author.

Now that groups.drupal.org is using date.module for its events, we really need someone to help signup module understand this date format. Please read this issue and consider writing the patch.

I unmoderated the wysiwyg and a couple of local user group groups. Hopefully I haven't overstepped... They seemed like reasonable groups. I didn't unmoderate the victoria one because it doesn't even have a description.

Is there a set policy somewhere on what groups are allowed and who is allowed to allow them? Obvious spam ones I delete but I'm never sure if I should be unmoderating the legit ones or not.

Thanks,

Michelle

More tweaks today.

• The groups overview page now has a Language field and exposed filter. Just trying to highlight how global we are.
• The My groups block now list the number of new posts in each group.

Feedback welcome.