Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskellers.com recent changes (and I need some volunteers)

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 3:24 PM, Michael Snoyman wrote:

On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 2:44 PM, Magnus Therning wrote:

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On Mon, Oct 11, 2010 at 13:14, John Lato wrote:

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From: Michael Snoyman

Also, now 10 random profiles will be displayed on the homepage. Only "verified users" will be displayed here. I'm also considering adding a new status as well: real picture, so that only people with real images (not cartoons, not identicons) can show up on the homepage. I think this might give a more professional feel. Thoughts?

I agree that it would be nice to use only real pictures, however I wouldn't want to leave out those who choose not to use any image at all. What about a site policy that user images must be real pictures (if they exist), and violations can be flagged/blocked? Although, I don't know how this would interact with using OpenID, which appears to be most of the users currently displaying an identicon.

I think it would be wrong to have haskellers.com impose restrictions on what image I put on gravatar. My image on gravatar pops up in numerous other sites (I believe stackoverflow, ohloh, flickr, etc) and I'm not necessarily happy with putting my photo everywhere, even though I'd be fine with putting it on haskellers.com.

So, instead I'd like to see the use of gravatar become optional. Then if haskellers.org could require a photo, and I could simply choose not to get my cartoon image from gravatar.

An obvious extension would be to allow me to get the image from other sources in the future, maybe an option to grab a picture out of an album on Facebook, or Flickr?

So firstly, just to clarify, I was never recommending we make real photos a requirement to have an account on Haskellers. I was simply talking about the 10 random profiles that get shown on the homepage: I think it gives a more professional feel to the site if we see 10 "real people" and not Bart Simpson. That was my question.

I generally agree on this point, however having a profile on the homepage (even if it is randomly selected) provides a great deal of publicity and legitimacy to that profile (as much as haskellers.com can provide!). I think this should be equally available to users who for whatever reason do not wish to share a photo image.

Now, the idea of using something besides gravatar is a fair point. I know personally I *like* it when sites use gravatar, as it's one less site I have to upload my image to. Otherwise, I need to search around for my preferred profile image, crop it to whatever that site wants, hope they'll scale it nicely, etc. From the site maintainer standpoint, gravatar also means there's less moving parts on Haskellers, and it decreases our bandwidth significantly, which is definitely something to consider.

I'll definitely put some thought into providing an alternative to gravatar. In the meanwhile, an option you have is to add a second gravatar email address. This works especially well with Gmail accounts, where you can just use a + sign (eg, michael+haskellers@snoyman.com ). I'm not saying this is ideal, but if you want to have your real photo up, it will work today.

That seems to be reasonable. Although this is only an issue if there's some sort of real-image restriction to the functionality of haskellers.com. I don't think the implementation should be difficult once the policy is decided. John