Contributions Should Not Require Approval

[SilasReinagel]

Since this is already for trusted member, it would be better not to require approval for submitted articles and comments/links.

Instead, if needed (probably not needed yet) things could be flagged if they are suspect.

[skapral]

@SilasReinagel I'm generally against the proposal. Sorry. The approval is not about trust, it's about control. There is no need to count it as a diminishing of trust.

I did approval with following considerations in mind:

• it's trivial - easy to implement and organize
• approval doesn't take too much effort from the admin (just open a link in agenda, glance it through and confirm that it is relevant stuff)
• it is reliable (admin won't accidentally skip anything - admin agenda will always show to him the stuff he haven't approved yet).

Also, with approval, approving stuff becomes a mandatory responsibility of community admin - a single man. With flagging, it will be a ad-hoc responsibility of volunteers, who may (or may not) flag the item. I don't like it.

[SilasReinagel]

What is the difference between trust and control? Is not control necessary when one can't trust people to do their job? Isn't control unnecessary when responsibilities are already clear and well-enforced?

In any, the biggest reason I propose this is because of seeing the effects of single-point-of-failure in EO and 0crat projects. When one person is the ARC, the project effectively dies when the ARC becomes unresponsive.

Requiring Admin approval ensures that this system has a single point of failure for it's operations. If it weren't for seeing the glacial pace of response on projects such as SixNines, PDD and similar, I wouldn't be so opposed to single admin. Since this is a free project with no money attached and no penalties, the admin is not highly naturally motivated.

An alternative is to give multiple people admin approval privilege. This reduces the possibility of project death due to one ARC who is busy with life.

[skapral]

In any, the biggest reason I propose this is because of seeing the effects of single-point-of-failure in EO and 0crat projects. When one person is the ARC, the project effectively dies when the ARC becomes unresponsive.

In case of poetryclub, it's not that dramatic. In worst case, when the admin not responds, there will be lots of "waiting for approval" messages, but nobody will be automatically "fired". Theoretically, I was thinking of a feature like "if admin doesn't respond to incoming approval requests, he loses his privilege and it is delegated to someone else", but it's the other story.

The admin's role is inspired by a Secretary role - according initial idea it is the guy who tracks the community activity, suggests whom to eject and whom to let join (see the original rules). Approval mechanism is just a mechanism for helping him tracking activity, first of all.

Anyway - for the test period I am the admin. And I am not impacted by the current poetryclub loadout - its really small for now :). I am not going to disappear in the nearest time. Why don't we return to this issue later, when it causes us real inconvenience?

[SilasReinagel]

Sounds good. The semantic of secretary adds a lot of clarity. Much different role and connotation than "Admin".

We can return to this ticket later.