On Mon, 11 Oct 2010 05:50:32 +0200, Michael Snoyman
Sorry to everyone for not getting back so quickly, I kept getting errors from postfix when I tried sending mail to the cafe. Hopefully this one will go through. As I see it, two open issues are "flagging" and "real Haskellers".
Flagging: this was simply a mistake in terminology on my part. I've replaced it with "Report this user." It should be used for either inappropriate content, spam, or someone who's just clearly not part of the community (eg, "Lol, I don't know Haskell, I had Cocoa Puffs for breakfast"). I'm purposely being vague about this; if a user *thinks* there's a problem, it shouldn't take an admin more than a few seconds to investigate it.
Now the more important question about real Haskellers: I think I mentioned before implementing the feature that I was a little bit nervous about doing so. The main reason I went ahead and did it anyway was we were getting some... strange gravatars showing up on the homepage. This problem was solved automatically when I added sorting by years of experience (no one can object to Simon PJ and Lennart being on the homepage of course), but the problem with that system is *anyone* can just set their start year to 1990 and get homepage status until an admin blocks him/her.
So for the moment, real Haskeller is a minimal whitelisting system, simply intended to prevent people from gaming the system. I've probably chosen bad terminology, and by not explaining this upset a lot of people, my apologies. The point here is not to make the real Haskeller status exclusive, but just to give an extra level of protection. If people really think this is a bad idea, we can take it out. However, keep in mind that the community already seems to favor whitelists (the wiki requires admin intervention for an account, same on HackageDB).
I think that "Verified accounts" sounds more appropriate than "Real Haskellers", then. Regards, -- Nicolas Pouillard http://nicolaspouillard.fr