Sending to docs@ as well, as this applies to that list too. Grumpiness may occur, so apologies in advance.
On 05/19/2012 09:32 AM, Kaspar Brand wrote: > Looking at the call for votes [retained below for reference] and at the > votes, I'm not sure if the +1 voters were aware of the specific > "mechanics" of the Disqus comment system which is now embedded into all > HTML below http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/ [1], however. The vote did refer to a proposal on the apache wiki that specifically mentioned Disqus as the method of choice. If people were unaware of how Disqus operates then, frankly and with respect, they should aim to work with due diligence or ask questions before voting. It should be a well known fact that using third party tools will eventually result in visitor tracking occurring one way or another. If people would rather see us use a comment system developed and housed by Apache, then I'm sure we can figure something out, but it requires that people say so. > Effectively, using Disqus means that even visiting an "innocent" page > like http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/license.html will already result > in all sorts of "drive-by" tracking requests [2], among them Google > Analytics (pulled in via httpd.disqus.com/thread.js). > > Based on the fact that there's currently no privacy policy for > httpd.apache.org - which would make visitors aware of being tracked (and > link to both the Disqus privacy policy [3] and the GA privacy policy > [4]) - I believe that the vote should be repeated, with being recast to: > > [+/-1] Add the Disqus commentary system to the trunk documentation. Meh, it makes me a sad panda that we have to discuss this once again, but you may have a point here. I suppose it would be in the Apache spirit to keep our intentions as open as possible, which merits a privacy policy. I have already written up a draft for such a policy, and included the GA and Disqus techs used in the proposed comment system and analytics for the docs. It can be found at http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/PrivacyPolicy . It is loosely based on the policies that are in place for other Apache projects such as Lucene and Directory (which also makes use of GA on their sites). This will effectively make for two (or three) new votes for adopting each piece: - Adopt a privacy policy for the docs and refer to the various tracking methods used as they get implemented - see the draft at http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/PrivacyPolicy - Implement the Disqus commentary system for the docs - see the proposal at http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/DocsCommentSystem - Implement visitor tracking for the docs so we can improve on them - see proposal at http://wiki.apache.org/httpd/DocsAnalyticsProposal I'll let this sink in for a few days, and then I will propose a vote for each segment in the order displayed above. If any of you have comments, suggestions, critique, anything, I urge you to please step forward and say so. I dislike the illusion of consensus just because people can't be bothered speaking up until something is actually committed to the repository. > As an interim measure, I also think it would be wise to revert the > changes applied in r1335029/r1335773, for the time being. We have already voted on adding _a_ commentary system to the documentation, so I'm not going to revert all the blood, sweat and tears that went into integrating a comment section in the docs, but what I can and will is add a JavaScript hack to disable the Disqus commentary system itself while we get this sorted out. Regardless of which method of commenting we eventually settle on, it will still require the same basic structure as is defined at the moment, so I see no point in scrapping all of it, just to reinstate it again. With regards, Daniel.
