For several months I haven't been able to post directly to the EM list.
This is another test to see if I can post now.

On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 10:24 PM, Someone fdpk69p6uq@snkmail.com wrote:

Hi folks,

Sorry for the (very) delayed response.  I've got a few ideas about
upgrades for EM/Electorama's infrastructure, and one day I may even
write them up and send something out to this list  ;-)

More inline....

On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 12:42 PM, Jan Kok jan.kok.5y@gmail.com wrote:

Not sure why the list seems to be flaking out periodically, that mail
got through.

Not abandoned, but on my personal backburner.  Setting aside the tech
issues (e.g. getting logged in, getting messages through, etc), what
is it that y'all are hoping to accomplish:
a) on the mailing list?
b) on the wiki?

Rob

Thanks for the note, Toby.  I went ahead and blindly gave User:Toby on
Electowiki "confirmed" status.  Assuming that's your account, you may
now be able to edit pages there.

I also sent a note to Dreamhost about the bounce I received from the
mailing list related to your email.  I'm not sure what's going on
there, but there could be a problem with email between Dreamhost
(where the mailing list and the wiki is) and yahoo.co.uk.

In general, the Electowiki content has become dated and harder than it
should be to update.  I'd like to keep hosting the content I'm
licensed to host, but I also would be just as happy to get out of the
content hosting business and rely on other mechanisms to share
content.

Restating your answer to my question: you're looking for a place to
collaborate with people in this community about approval/score-based
proportional representation.  Do you do online collaborative writing
in other contexts?  If so, which tools do you use?

Rob

On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 2:13 AM, Toby Pereira tdp201b@yahoo.co.uk wrote:

I made a change to the mailing list settings to see if that helps make
posting more reliable (and this message is a test)

Rob
p.s. I changed the from_is_list setting https://wiki.list.org/DEV/DMARC

On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 12:42 PM, Jan Kok jan.kok.5y@gmail.com wrote:

On 12/30/2016 02:54 AM, Rob Lanphier wrote:

I'd also like to note that your mail (the one I'm quoting) is the last
one that my mail client shows me the name of the person sending it in
the From field. Everything sent to EM that's more recent than your post
here shows up as being from the list rather than the person. Did you
change anything? I find it useful to see who it's from, though I suppose
some antispam systems may trigger falsely.

As for Electowiki, perhaps you could give someone else privileges to
approve users -- or choose the Wikipedia model where anyone (possibly
except spammers) can edit.

There also seems to be something odd going on with the EM archives.
Although the index doesn't work (only ranges back to 2015, see
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/
), it's possible to manually go to earlier points (e.g.
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2006-November/date.html),
though in that case, the by-thread view seems to be busted.

On Wed, Dec 28, 2016 at 7:23 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:

a) I don't like mailing lists.  I'm just here to ask about wiki account.

b) When I first encountered it months ago, I was excited about fixing and
updating things on it, and posting my own research on my user page. I
started to make a list of needed edits, expecting to quickly get an account:

• http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
  • Fix "United States Libertarian Party|Libertarian Party"
  • Clarify "preferential vote" term also applies more broadly to other
    systems with preferential ballots
  • Remove redlinks to non-election topics or link them to Wikipedia
    instead
  • Update about adoption by Maine
  • capitalize "australian", "green party"
  • shorten to "IRV" in lots of places
• http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Template:Tenn_voting_example
  • Fix the image
  • http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Range_voting
  • Clarify that cardinal is a class that includes range/score,
    approval, cumulative, etc.
• http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Approval_voting
  • See Also should be a list
  • Move http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Consensus_voting into a
    subsection of Approval page
• etc.

On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 6:59 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

Yes, please.  I imagine it shouldn't be as open as Wikipedia because there
aren't as many users monitoring for spam, but MediaWiki can be locked down
to varying degrees and you can give trusted users the ability to approve
new users, etc.:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Moderation
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgRateLimits

Hi Kristofer and "Someone"

Replies inline below (first to Kristofer's comments, then to Someone's)

On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 3:59 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
km_elmet@t-online.de wrote:

Yup, I did change something (a couple of days ago), but now (earlier
this afternoon) I've changed it back to the way that it was a few days
ago.  I was relying on some advice from my hosting provider to solve
an email bouncing problem, and it appears they recommended a
deprecated Mailman feature.  I may play with this some more in the
coming days.

There's a long saga around this problem.  It used to be much easier to
edit, but spammers overtook the site.  For a while, i was able to keep
up by making periodic spam-cleanup sweeps, but the spammers got too
sophisticated.

Yeah, that's another one I need to pester my provider about.  I don't
have access to be able to fix that.

On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 6:20 AM, Someone fdpk69p6uq@snkmail.com wrote:

Fair enough.  Is there a forum solution you'd prefer?

Ugh...sorry about that.  There's been a bug or two in a MediaWiki
extension that I'm relying on that I didn't have the opportunity to
debug.  In general, rather than making incremental changes to the
existing setup, I'm starting to think much more broadly about big
changes.

Most of the changes you suggested would be great changes for someone
with edit rights to be able to make, so perhaps you could contact me
offlist with the account name you'd like me to fix.  I may be able to
fix it.

This one I fixed.  There may be other images that are similarly
broken. My restoration technique is somewhat cautious, which is one
reason I'm not making a bit sweep.

Thanks for the suggestions.  I'm pretty familiar with those pages, and
MediaWiki's spam fighting tech, and the challenge is what you allude
to.  Wiki-based spam fighting on an open wiki is really complicated,
and MediaWiki's spam fighting solutions are geared toward sites with
hundreds if not thousands of active editors.  With enough effort, it's
possible to use the software on a site the size of Electowiki, but
what I'm wondering is if the effort wouldn't be better placed
elsewhere (e.g. migrating to a different collaborative editing
solution)

Rob

I know this wasn't addressed to me, but I think that forums/message boards that have separate topic threads are better. Mailing lists are a relic of the 1990s. The Center for Election Science uses a Google Group which seems to work OK.
Toby

  From: Rob Lanphier <robla@robla.net>

 
On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 6:20 AM, Someone fdpk69p6uq@snkmail.com wrote:

Fair enough.  Is there a forum solution you'd prefer?