Controlling and Deleting Posts to Keep "We" the People Out

[Michael Allan]

JAnne and Alex,

JAnne Davies wrote:
> Hey Alex and others, Maybe instead of deleting stuff to exclude
> other voices so that they are deterred from responding..... Votorola
> should take a more inclusive approach by encouraging multifaceted
> debate. If you "diss" your public voice now" then........

I think you're responding to Alex's comment, below.  (?)  So we're
talking about GoogleGroups, not Votorola.  (Votorola deletes, excludes
and suppresses nothing.  We take pride in that. :-)

Alex Rollin wrote in the other thread:
> I realize I changed the thread by not deleting the contents of the
> message, earlier.  Sorry about that.  Learned something about
> GoogleGroups.

http://groups.google.com/group/votorola/t/6492b45b50f39a8a
You mean deleting the quoted material?  I'm not sure that will help.

I think it's only because you changed the subject line, and thus
spawned a sub-thread.  That's OK.  I do that, too.  But GoogleGroups'
Web archive doesn't properly handle sub-threads.  It smushes them all
together, and inserts those ridiculous "Discussion subject changed by
so-and-so" headings..  If you switch it to a threaded view (options at
top) then it shows a thread index, which helps a little.  But overall
it sucks.

An alternative to GoogleGroups is GroupServer.  It's used by
e-democracy.org (as JAnne suggests):

> http://dowire.org/ and http://forums.e-democracy.org/ and
> http://www.e-democracy.org/do/commons.html

When you change the subject line there (spawning a sub-thread), the
Web archive treats it as an entirely new thread.  That's a smarter
approach than Google's.

The mail archives are unaffected by either approach, ofc.  They're
entirely controlled by our mail clients - Outlook, mutt - whatever we
happen to be using.  My mutt client has an excellent threaded view,
and I don't normally use the Web archives.

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 647-436-4521
http://zelea.com/