Want to take part in these discussions? Sign in if you have an account, or apply for one below
Vanilla 1.1.10 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
Great work! Just a friendly note, in case you happen to see this, that I’d suggest not to re-use an empty page in this way, as it makes the history a bit hard to follow. It is no trouble for me to delete empty pages, and I’d rather we do that. I realise that this may be a change in recommendation from earlier practise, my apologies for any confusion!
Yes, the earlier practice was based on my desire to never delete any pages, and I rather hope that you have not deleted any yet! I'd actually like to fix the software so that no edit history is ever lost (including page moves and things like that); I realize that we might not achieve that goal, but at the very least I don't want to make extra effort to remove information. (Not that it's always a great loss, but deleting pages is a slippery slope that I watched Wikipedia tumble down, and I don't want it to happen here.)
We started reusing empty pages to avoid letting them pile up, although that hasn't really worked, and I'll quit doing that if it annoys you (or anybody else, really). They haven't piled up to an unmanageable level, and casual users never see them, so reusing them isn't as necessary as it once seemed. And I can see here that it wreaks havoc with the automatic comment system!
Maybe it’s good never to erase what once was intended as genuine content. But at some point spam pages were being recycled for content, and we really shouldn’t do that, I think, since it just serves to anchor spam into our database, even if just in the edit history.
Yes, this example wasn't spam, but most of what I've ended up recycling in this way was originally spam. Since edit history is rarely viewed and isn't archived by Google et al (see https://ncatlab.org/robots.txt), the spam doesn't cause any harm. (This is in contrast to leaving spam comments at the bottom of old blog posts, where they continue to attract clicks and page rank, which incentivizes more spam besides causing direct harm to foolish readers.) If I stop recycling it, then it will be even better hidden.
Wikipedia started out deleting only obvious garbage in rare circumstances, and a few years later (I don't mean today, I mean over 10 years ago) it had gotten to the point that a new user could spend hours writing a new article, only to get it deleted for one reason or another, and then they couldn't even see what they'd just written! Usually the removal from the main article space is for a good reason, but the permanent hiding from the writer is a harmful side effect that nobody has cared enough to fix in over a decade. (There's only a process in place for requesting permission to see what you wrote, and people are sometimes denied even that.) I don't want the nLab to start down that route, which is why I want to only hide (and not delete) even spam unless doing so actually causes a problem.
I've tried to keep up on policy discussions, but if we've started deleting spam, then I don't know about it. If Richard and Urs want to propose deleting spam, then I don't think that this is the place to do that.
1 to 10 of 10
