Part of me thinks that we're really overblowing this whole issue,
but the other part disagrees, saying that so many people wouldn't
be interested if this was trivial. Then the first part said... oh never mind.
Ok, I'm not going to be any more definitive than anyone else here, but I
have some observations to offer. Before you get out the flamethrowers, I
know this is all obvious, but sometimes stating the obvious helps! Also, lest this
be misconstrued, note that I'm not meaning to imply anything untoward about any individual here.
- anything you enter anywhere here (apart from /tell, maybe) may be read by anyone on the 'net
- just because you see albannach say something in the chatterbox does not mean that it wasn't one of his cats lying on the keyboard, or one of his co-workers trying to embarass him
- anything you read in a node, despite annotations or citations, could well be a complete fabrication
- I could put a really deep metaphysical point here about the nature of existance and you wouldn't be able to prove it wrong either
- you cannot stop people from logging the chatterbox themselves, short of having
all the text converted to old english and written in a bitmap (but then you'd just get someone to write a kickass OCR in Perl...). In fact, it
would probably be foolish to assume it was not being recorded somewhere. In public it would be very sad to think
you were being recorded, but here the Chatterbox is often of great value, and I expect that many people, lurkers and otherwise, at least save bits and pieces.
So, is there a solution? If everyone understands these
points, is there a problem? Quoting myself in the
chatterbox earlier (I reviewed this and gave myself
permission ;-) "I'm full of good and bad ideas, I just can't
tell them apart":
- the Official Monastery Policy on the usage of the Chatterbox should make clear what is
intended (as well as the potential risks noted above), though this may not have any bearing on what is legal, or what is actually done (has anyone ever been excommunicated, err, undef()'d from the Monastery?)
- the chatterbox could have an /anon command so that your name wouldn't be shown
- as has been noted above, it would be wise to confirm permission and probably allow review of
any attributed text before posting it to a node. This would ensure
the information is reasonably accurate, and nobody quoted in the text would
be upset later. It may be that some would allow it to be posted if their names were obscured.
I'm running a risk of getting into a commentary on the degradation of
society as a whole here, so I'll cut it off for now. Of course I've been
distracted so many times since I started this that it's probably
all been said by now, but I'll be damned if I'm going to waste these
electrons!
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