Hi, Cindy, Don and All,
On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 12:59 AM, Don Cameron <d...@internode.on.net> wrote: > The DDN email list still seems fairly active so is there any reason the > community itself cannot take responsibility for administration of the DDN > web? Spam waves were really hellish at DDN, Don: I caught a few because I had enabled alerts for comments to my blog, so when there was a spam there, I checked the other blogs and forums, and if the attack was general, I contacted TIG. But that was a haphazard way. Also, the filtering software used in an attempt to stem these waves didn't quite work for that, but made direct posting difficult: I kept getting "inappropriate content" refusals, even when my posts were perfectly chaste and politically correct. > > By way of comparison - TechSoup forums and community's are managed by a > small team of geographically dispersed volunteers. TS staff oversee the > process however most day-2-day admin and moderation tasks (generating > discussions, answering queries, removing spam and spammers etc.) are > completed by volunteers. > > It's not a criticism of DDN to suggest that Techsoup is a lot more active > (and receives a lot more spam albeit hidden to the userbase!) than DDN, > mostly due to the efforts of our volunteers. Administering the DDN web > really should not be an onerous task providing suitable volunteers can be > found. True: I had the same experience on a much smaller scale for a "joint podcast" hosted at podhost.de: there the software efficiently quaranteened spams - and at times they ran into hundreds per day for weeks: admins could just check and then delete the rubbish. But apparently there is no way to have that kind of quaranteening on the DDN site. > > Plus... as I sit in a tiny village in rural Australia administering a forum > run by an organisation based in California providing support to NPO's in > such diverse locations as Ottawa, Cape Town, New York City and elsewhere... > I'm left thinking... Isn't this exactly what DDN aspires to promote? What a > world is opened when we challenge and break this digital divide! Yes, of course. However the fact that TIG, in spite of having qualified technicians working on the spam issue, didn't manage to correct it, makes me doubt if volunteers could cope with it. It could be a matter of the platform software. Just one more work-around idea: On the one hand, members of this list are still active in breaking the digital divide, but on several other platforms. On the other hand, the Diigo.com social bookmarking platform has a group feature: see for instance <http://groups.diigo.com/groups/images4education>, where each group has: - a description - a common list of bookmarks created by adding "share with ... group" when you bookmark something; you can also share already existing bookmarks to a group; and you can import bookmarks from another platform and export the Diigo ones to it automatically - a discussion forum Membership and forum are easy to monitor. And if the spam should really hit the fan hard at the forum, it can be temporary disabled with one click, without deleting existing posts. There are other nice features, but most importantly, the bookmark list and the forum have each an RSS feed. So if we were to create a "digitaldivide" Diigo group, couldn't its 2 RSS feeds be shown on the DDN site, as used to be the case in the "Featured RSS Feeds" box (see for instance the 2005 archived version <http://web.archive.org/web/20051024025244/http://www.digitaldivide.net/>? Best Claude _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list DIGITALDIVIDE@digitaldivide.net http://digitaldivide.net/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to digitaldivide-requ...@digitaldivide.net with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
