Hari's Corner

For quite a while now I've been championing a cause at LinuxQuestions.org where I'm proud to say I've been a fairly active member, helping out wherever I can (to the best of my feeble, limited knowledge and experience). And I'm proud to say that I am 100% on the side of Linux. Over a period of time, I've shed my ambivalence and these days I rarely use Windows.

There was recently a debate going on about forum rules and regulations regarding members who use abusive language and otherwise disrupt the harmony of the forum and this led to a more involved debate about whether more or less moderation is required to deal with all the problems. Needless to say, I championed more moderation which was an idea unpopular with the current administration team at LQ.org and quite a few members as well.

This signature which I now use at LQ sums up my recent stand on this issue:

Appeal To All Members: Please do not post Linux vs. Windows threads or tell us why Linux sucks so much. We have heard all these arguments a thousand times and we couldn't care less whether you use Linux or not. This is primarily a Linux help site. If it's help you want, then more likely you'll find the place useful. If you want to rant, you could create your own blog for free!

I am proud to be in the minority, championing a zero-tolerance policy towards spammers and trolls. To my mind, there is nothing worse than abusing a website that promotes an Operating System that is not only Free (as in Freedom) but also has such a number of friendly and knowledgeable users willing to spare their time to promote a cause that is close to their hearts. But let's not take that help for granted. Let's not forget that of the 170,000+ odd members there are hardly a thousand members who actually use the site regularly solely to help others rather than seek help themselves. The site runs smoothly and successfully simply because a small minority of users (compared to the total size of membership) take it upon themselves to contribute.

And yet, there are so many ungrateful wretches who will ruin all this by abusing the help, denigrating Linux and its community or flaming fellow members. The current moderators feel that it's all under control, but I say why should it be under control? Why not stamp out this abuse of LQ.org completely?

Because it is nothing more than abuse, unless somebody seeks help genuinely. While there is a slight leeway to allow debate and discussion on general issues, I believe LQ.org is primarily a technical help site which should focus exclusively on Linux and those who use Linux. It is not there to provide free publicity to all those trolls and half-trolls who relish not only in attacking an Operating System that is based on the concepts of Freedom, but also the community that goes to great lengths to preserve and promote it.

It's like somebody walking into your house and then deliberately and provocatively insulting you. I don't know how many people would tolerate this, but I sure will not tolerate it.

Let's not put up with this continual abuse by adopting half-measures. A zero-tolerance policy will not only establish clear guidelines on what is acceptable and what is not, but also clear the air and make the forum more focussed. It will also be fair on all members and everybody will surely know where they stand with regard to the rules. That ambivalence that is prevalent now will be forever buried and a clear policy will be established thus making it easier for the moderators to make decisions. Debates are fine, but there is a limit beyond which they cease to become meaningful and only promote disharmony and disruption. By weeding out such provocative and repeated topics and preventing their recurrence by closing new ones which spring up from time to time, the forum will become much more focussed and friendly. 60 percent of flaming can be stopped by prevention rather than cure.

And if implementing these policies require more moderators then so be it.

Another issue of the LiteraryForums.org newsletter and I hoped that by the time I got around to this, LiteraryForums.org would have a shiny new look. Unfortunately this is not the case. For all those of you who have been awaiting this eagerly, I convey my sincere apologies. Hope you can wait a bit longer so that I can sort out a few things.

Let me explain some reasons why this anticipated change hasn't happened yet. Before going into them, let me say nearly 60% of the site has been redesigned off-line. The work then started dragging along and for a couple of weeks then came to a dead halt. I must admit that I was busy with other things. That's just one of the reasons. Another, and more important reason, is my sudden dilemma about the forum software. For several months now, I have been considering moving from phpBB to a different solution. I have already given reasons for this. This not only made me think twice about spending more time in working on something that I considered discarding, this process of downloading, installing, testing and learning other solutions has really kept me occupied in that period of time. But on the whole, I have finally decided that it's best to leave the current setup well alone and continue using phpBB for the time being. Now that this decision has been made, I will concentrate once again on the half-finished redesign work and upload the results as soon I can!

On a different note, my other activities has increased to such an extent that I have really not had the time or energy to participate in the forums. Firstly, maintaining this site is really taking quite a toll on my creative juices. Also my reading has drastically come down of late and I have been unable to contribute any fresh reviews. As a result, I have noticed a drop-off in activity. Again, all I can do is request members to take part in discussions at LiteraryForums.org and keep the community going. Your participation is much appreciated!

Yours Sincerely,

Hari (Forum Host)

Ever since I've got down to redesigning LiteraryForums.org (progress report on this coming up in the next community newsletter!) I've been thinking very hard about a certain issue that has eluded a straightforward answer in my own mind. It's a very simple question. When one gets down to design a dynamic website (in other words, server-side scripted, not static), does style (look, feel and design) come first or is the utility more important? In other words, should the web designer's focus be on style or should the focus be on features and utility? Mind you, I haven't mentioned the word "content" here at all...

Actually one might think that utility comes first. After all, who's bothered about the style of a website? Features should come first, right? For a long time I used to think so too, but these days, I'm not really sure. There are a couple of reasons for my dilemma.

First of all, a unique design certainly helps a website develop a certain sense of identity among your visitors. This is especially true of websites which need a reason to develop a faithful base of users, like a web forum, for its growth. A unique design also gives a sense of pride to you, the owner of the website. Last but not least, it is fairly easy to switch between different styles these days. Most present-generation server-side scripts for CMS, blogs and forums have some kind of a templating system that separates the functionality from the style, thus making it fairly easy to experiment with different styles before coming up with one that you like and can stick with. Almost nobody would use the default templates for most of these pre-built scripts because they end up looking pretty common as thousands of users download and use them (especially with the Open Source scripts).

On the other hand, is functionality as important as is made out to be? I've already mentioned in a previous blog entry (see phpBB: to BB or not to BB) about the disadvantages of "modding" scripts - customizing code and adding extra features and such - because maintaining and upgrading becomes a nightmare. Not only this, but I would add that some of the customizations and feature additions can actually end up adding very little value to a website while at the same time conflicting with a very real yearning for simplicity and elegance in design. A very good example of such a "useless feature" is avatars. Who can think of a more worthless, band-width sucking waste of disk and screen space than avatars: those annoying little images that members choose to place below their nicknames? And yet it never ceases to amaze me how many people consider them as an essential part of an online forum!

My take is that, while I always consider features to be of some importance, the design is equally important. In fact, most of your visitors may not care too much for all those features you might have, but will actually end up with a photographic image of your website design in their minds stored up for future reference. Since the design is the most visible aspect of your website and first impressions count a lot, it is so important to make a visible impression. And if you have to sacrifice a few "features" for the sake of a clean, elegant and (in most cases) professional design, then so be it.

But where does one find this right balance between style and functionality? At what point does a simple, elegant design conflict with "desired features"? I'm afraid I can offer no easy answers to that one.

In the first place, let me mention that I get very little spam in my mailbox. Probably a couple a week (our ISP account gets flooded with them). So going by that standard, the free e-mail accounts I use are relatively spam-free. It may just be a natural consequence of my cautious nature in keeping my mail IDs fairly private.

Anyway, I have two e-mail accounts which I use. One is with Yahoo and the other is a gmail account. Both have spam filters and from what I have observed, I find the one in google mail to be far superior to Yahoo's "bulk mail" feature. For somebody who expected better results in Yahoo, this comes as a stunning fact. And I make my judgements on hard, practical experience over several months.

I have found Yahoo's "bulk mail" folder to be most unreliable. On more than one occasion, genuine e-mails have slipped through the inbox and fallen into the "bulk" box. On the other hand, spam does slip into the inbox rather more frequently. This has not been a one-time aberration but a regular event. Sure, you get the report spam options, but that's rather like the cure: not prevention. And as they say prevention is far better than cure. Especially when the disease is spam.

On the contrary, google mail's spam filter has been giving consistently better results. It is true that I get a lot more spam on my google account, but the fact is that the spam filter has had an accuracy of 99.99% in detecting spam so far (in my case) and even well-disguised spam mails (with ordinary looking subjects, plain text body with no images) have been consistently rejected. There was just one occasion when a spam managed to slip through its defences, but that's quite acceptable. Almost always I can be sure that the mail I receive in the Spam folder will be spam. With Yahoo, I can never take the chance of trashing my bulk mail before taking a glance at its contents.

An amazing fact, but I would have expected the more experienced Yahoo to be the leaders in this field. It shouldn't really have surprised me, though. It's not just in spam filtering that google has overtaken its competition...

Consider the fact that google has revolutionized the field of free webmail providers. In the first place, they made gmail the exclusive domain of a few beta-testers: making it all the more desirable in the eyes of everybody: a very astute move. Slowly and surely they expanded with the unique concept of "invitation-only" registration. They offered a mind-boggling 1 GB of mail space, which was unthinkable at that time. This has not only forced other webmail-giants like Yahoo to keep up with google as far as storage space is concerned (there were days when 6 MB was considered quite enough!), but google's innovative (some critics might say "gimmicky") ideas have been pushed rather aggressively and rapidly and not the least, the implementation of these ideas have been extremely successful. While Yahoo still keeps displaying annoying, full-blown graphical ads in my mailbox, with google, the annoyances never existed in the first place! Talk about revolutionary: their concepts have really made the competition look bad... and worse, obsolete.

How long google can keep this up is another matter, though. What is undeniable is that they have unleashed new, dynamic forces in the field of web services and one can only look forward to more innovations and advances in the future! I am an optimist and I believe that the rise of google can only mean more choices, higher value and better competition in the field of web services... and its a good thing for all of us.

Two Linux Distributions that are similar in many ways and yet so different... I'm talking about Debian and Gentoo. You can observe a bit of bias here, because I have both these operating systems in my computer and I can say that these two are my favourites. Of all the Linux distributions I've used, I have found Debian to be my best choice, closely followed by Gentoo.

So what is it about Debian and Gentoo that makes them so similar? Here are some of my impressions.

Firstly both are general purpose distributions (neither are particularly "tailored" or "customized" for any particular purpose). Both use built-in package management systems that makes installing and uninstalling applications a lot less painful than other distributions, mainly by resolving dependency issues automatically. Next, both these are easy as pie to maintain and upgrade and both provide stability as a priority by maintaining strict standards (especially Debian) controlling what versions of which applications make it to their package repositories. Rarely will you get "broken" applications in either unless you deliberately choose to use the unstable repositories. Thirdly both are extremely customizable to specific needs, though you won't find much by way of GUI configuration tools in either. But neither are too difficult. Gentoo, in particular, in spite of its scary reputation among newbies, is actually a breeze to configure once it's up and running thanks to the comprehensive documentation in the Gentoo handbook.

With Debian and Gentoo, what you get are two, well-tested, well-maintained, rock-solid, community supported distributions with considerable user bases. And Debian, in particular, has a long, illustrious history, being one of the oldest distributions (along with Slackware) in the world of Linux. I am proud to be a part of the Debian community because Debian's success can be seen in the way so many newer distributions (like Ubuntu and Mepis among others) are based on it. And no wonder: by first hand experience, I can only say that there is a certain "comfort-factor" with Debian that I cannot find in any other distribution. Not even Gentoo.

In the next part, I will cover some of the differences in the philosophy and approach of these two Linux distributions as I see them.

As promised, here is the first issue of the LiteraryForums.org newsletter! This is indeed a good time to sit back and take stock of the first six months (and a bit) of LiteraryForums.org.

Six months: 1000 odd posts, 60 odd members with an average of about 10 registered members per month doesn't seem much. And it isn't. But more on this later.

Let me first highlight some positive achievements of LiteraryForums.org. First of all, let me take this opportunity to thank all those members who have registered and taken an active part in the discussions. In particular I'd like to thank all those of you who have posted articles to enhance and enrich the site's content. And a special thanks to those of you who were kind enough to link to our site in their signatures in other forums. I certainly appreciate these small, but vital gestures that can help in spreading the word, expanding the community and enriching our ideas and knowledge. Please do continue to support us in this way: you have my sincere gratitude.

The community has been growing slowly but steadily. There have been no flame wars and almost no spamming till date. This is a credit to all those who have participated. The quality of posting has been kept to a high standard and I am pleased to say that our moderators presently have very little work to do. The only moderation that I've ever done is moving a couple of topics around to their correct forums. It's been a pleasure to lead such a well-behaved and mature community.

On the flip side, LiteraryForums.org hasn't really taken off the way I thought it would. Six-odd months and I expected at least to see 5000 posts and 100+ members. Still, it's not the statistics that bother me, but the fact that only a small fraction of the registered members who have actually taken an initiative to post new topics and start fresh discussions. Another strange aspect is that while the website statistics show a steady rise in traffic, this traffic hasn't really converted into community participation effectively. This has certainly baffled me and has baffled a few others as well.

These are some points that needs to be worked on and I urge all those who have registered but haven't been participating in the forums to do so. If you have trouble starting off, then a good idea is to begin by introducing yourself to the community.

That said, my hopes are high. They say that content is king. Going by the axiom, content is certainly a strong point of LiteraryForums.org. Quality comes above quantity and thanks to our members, this has certainly been the case. Hopefully the same quality will be maintained in the future with a lot more participation from the book-loving community.

Yours Sincerely,

Hari (Forum Host)