[Catalog-sig] More problems with the comments system...

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

Chris Withers wrote:
[snip]
> - The whiner, *cough* I mean rater, then decided he didn't like the 
> comments suggesting he use the right mailing list and/or asking him to 
> explain his nonsensical bullet list and so deleted the whole thread, 
> replacing it with his nonsensical bullet point list. (So now the 
> comments pointing to the right mailing lists can't be found by anyone, 
> and all the work done by people trying to help this individual is lost, 
> nice...)

I just resubscribed to this mailing list to report this scenario 
(independently from Chris. I tend to express myself a bit less 
forcefully too :)

In this discussion, I placed a comment in the zope.app.sqlscript thread 
to point to more modern ways to integrate the Zope Toolkit with 
relational databases. This comment (along with many others) is now lost 
because the original person deleted his comment and then recreated it. 
The current design therefore gives the commenter the power to destroy 
responses by package owners. And...

> - Because I'm marked as a "Package Index Owner", I can't rate or 
> independently comment on this package, even though I'm not its 
> maintainer, I'm just someone who's volunteered to take responsibility 
> for releasing a load of zope-related eggs when no-one else is around.

Happened to me too.

I attempted to place my comment in a separate thread to get it out of 
the power of the original rater, but I'm also one of the many package 
owners of this package. I therefore cannot place comments.

This means that any replies by package owners are at the mercy of 
package commenters. If a commenter wants to put up a negative comment 
and prevent the package owners from replying to it directly or 
indirectly, they have the power right now.

Of course the package owners can put a "reply" to the comment in the 
actual long description of the package, but that doesn't seem to be the 
right medium for it.

If comment disabling is implemented, I think a nice feature might be to 
repeat the author email metadata in its place (or perhaps a special 
metadata field for diccussion forums). This way someone who wants to 
comment on the package gets a clear indication of where they can to go.

Then again, offering a comment on ones rating versus a comment to the 
developers might be two different purposes.

Regards,

Martijn