Feedback on Repo.OpenPandora.org

[hedwards]

Yesyes, but that is irrelevant. As long as you yourself is neither Google nor NSA (nor privy to their databases), the fact that they'd track Sebt3 down in a week has no bearing on whether he is anonymous visavi the rest of the forum dwellers, which is the relevant thing here. Anonymity is not a binary thing, it is something you'd have in degrees and in relation.

For instance: To the general forum dweller, the larger identity of sebt3 is a mystery, but we can at least get an inkling of the persona that sebt3s handler wants to present, since we can assume that all posts from the same forum identity comes from the same source. That is fairly good anonymity. The admins can see stuff like IP numbers and so on, which means slightly less anonymity, and in particular those who also have admin rights to the repo can use that to ascertain with a fair degree of confidence whether forum-sebt3 is equal to repo-sebt3.  So, visavi the admins, you have a slightly lesser degree of anonymity. 

And so on. Saying "Nuh-huh, N00b, you're never anonymous on the net cuz GOOGLE PWNS Yr 4SS!!!" is just about as relevant as saying "Nuh-huh, but you didn't win this fight, cuz Mike Tyson'd beat you to a PULP!"

Honestly, that's still a rather naive approach to take. Unless he's been careful about never reusing the same username, never posting anywhere for more than a few posts, never having his email leaked when a company accidentally allows spammer access to it, he can be tracked down by anybody that really cares to.

There's a reason why there's that saying "loose lips sink ships" it's because it's not just one or two comments, people aren't very good about keeping track of what they've said, but people are pretty good about putting patterns together. Just look at that internet lynch mob that convened a few years ago to track down that cat abuser over on /b/.

The reason why people don't know who he is has more to do with nobody really caring who he is. The notion that he has any real anonymity online is rather laughable.

One of the issues with European privacy protection is that they don't provide the level of protection that's generally assumed. Sure, sites within the EU are supposed to, but that doesn't mean anything for sites that operate completely outside of the EU. It also doesn't mean that there isn't going to be a breach or ensure that you folks are going to actually be careful about what information you put out there.

BTW, it took me less than 30 seconds to get some rather "interesting" pictures of Thomas there. Some of them NSFW, so I won't be posting them.

 

[moxie]

You mean that you've found pictures of someone who uses the same username on another website? Which might or might not show the actual person? Yes, that is easy - The problem lies in ascertaining that the connections are solid. For which you'd need more than just a match on usernames. And which you might get info if you manage to convince the whole of 4chan to get on the case (and this is a situation on par with being google, as far as net computing power is concerned).

However, that still isn't relevant, because that is not the kind of relative anonymity that is in question here (not to mention that you'd probably have a hard time rousing the ire of 4chan over an unjustified one-star rating). Given enough computing power, anyone is identifiable on the net. Given enough online guile, you might make it more difficult. But that is not what is the question here - Here, it is a question of whether lack of in-context-of-forum-anonymity might cause less people to vote, or the converse - Whether trackable-in-the-context-of-the-community-votes might improve the quality of the responses on the repo. Personally, I don't think either of it matters much - I think the low response frequency has a lot more to do with the lack of voting encouragement, and a much better way to improve it would be for the repo to remind you to vote on stuff you've downloaded but not rated - but bringing in the "You're never anonymous on the net!!!" is just irrelevant.

 

[_jr_]

I'm still trying to grasp the issue we are trying to solve.


Looking again at my (single) PND on the repo (pysolfc), there are three forms of feedback available: the number of downloads (currently 274, putting it into the 500-600 most downloaded PNDs bracket), the comments (7 to date - excluding my own), and the rating (6 votes with an average of 4.67, making it top rated in the category card game with the most votes). Interestingly there are actually more comments than votes, and they are very positive, making me quite happy, It is a great feature that I get notified of comments on the repo. The number of downloads does actually suprise me (in a positive way), especially because there has been no update for quite a while. But there aren't that many card games on the repo (which was the reason for the port in the first place), so probably everyone even remotely interested in card games did try the pnd, letting me assume that less than 10% of active Pandora owners are interested in solitaire card games I obviously have nothing to complain about the rating, and due to the way the current system works and the few number of votes it was the overall top voted PND of the repo for a day or two (I think that giving every the PND this chance is a nice property of the current system). But in the end I feel that the rating is the least relevant of the feedback mechanisms to me as the maintainer of this individual PND. IMO the rating is much more useful to highlight the long time favorites on the repo, since it just documents how happy users are with this particular package, without providing real clues as to what could be improved. I think it does capture the subjective feeling of happiness quite well, but every other mechanism would probably do that equally good. Would I feel different with a lower rating (while keeping the same comments and download number)? I honestly cannot say, but I suspect it would annoy me, too.


I'm not convinced how to improve the system, but linking rating and comments might be a good idea.


As a user I'd like to be able to browse PNDs by 'recently commented on', especially to quickly see answers to my comments and give the system a more interactive feel.


How do other maintainers use the feedback mechanism?

 

[notaz]

Noticed a few things while updating PCSX:

I get some ugly text wrapping both on Firefox and Chromium (see image).

It also seems while while a PND is being updated (and old one is being archived), the repo becomes completely unresponsive and no pages load.

 

[milkshake]

Interesting is this on the Pandora or on your desktop?

 

[Asmo]

(Probably unrelated but thought I'd mention)

I tried to download Firefox from the repo (on my Pandora) today but every attempt slowed to a crawl, had to give up, the site itself was loading apparently normally.

 

[notaz]

Interesting is this on the Pandora or on your desktop?

Linux desktop, both Firefox 34.0 and Chromium 39.0.2171.65 Ubuntu 14.04 (64-bit)

 

[milkshake]

(Probably unrelated but thought I'd mention)


I tried to download Firefox from the repo (on my Pandora) today but every attempt slowed to a crawl, had to give up, the site itself was loading apparently normally.

I have no idea what this is, I would suspect its unrelated to the site itself and maybe more to do with some bottleneck between your pandora and the ED's server

 

[Asmo]

I would suspect its unrelated to the site itself and maybe more to do with some bottleneck between your pandora and the ED's server

That's what I figured, it's back to normal now!