LL created this document to cover JIRA policies:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Issue_tracker

Note the stuff at the bottom, about "How do I help out?" They ENCOURAGE the community to help sift through issues. This JIRA would be completely useless without the constant work by me and countless others to winnow out the duplicates and misplaced support requests.

Secondly, ~I'm not sure about everyone, but me and Lex at least, use reasonable judgement in closing issues. I don't close things I don't agree with. I close:

individual support requests, with a comment to pursue a solution through LL support.
Duplicate issues, with the issue duplicated specified.
Waste of work issues, ie, fixing physics issues in havok 1, when havok 4 is jsut around the corner. Or adjusting basic sunsets when windlight is in beta now.
Vague or pointless issues. "Make the lag stop"
Issues requiring additional information. "My <insert arbitrary object> broke down in havok 4", with no info on how said object works, or where to get one for testing.
Silly feature requests. "Add gold farming so noobs can have a job",
Unreproducible issues. "This isn't working!" when it is working.
Requests to destroy things for no good reason "Ban sculpted prims. They make building unfair"
Requests to allow things directly detrimental to other residents. Eg, "make textures pop up again so we can spam people"

etc, etc.
All issues can be freely reopened, and in some cases, are intended to be reopened. When closing any issue, I will always leave a comment explaining my decision, and very rarely will someone disagree enough to reopen it. In the case of that happening, I will usually back down and leave it alone, except in the case of absurd unfeasible issues, where common sense makes the solution clear.

There are an average of ~20 new issues per day. A large proportion of which really don't belong here.Linden time is valuable, and a scarce resource. We are volunteers who help fill the gaps in administration work. We do not aim to control or subvert anything.

There's absolutely no reason why a function can't be put into the system whereby actions cannot be taken on a measure without the consent of the person who originally proposed the measure. They shouldn't have to be constantly hovering over their action, seeing if someone has just undone all their work and undermined their intent arbitrarily.

The effect of closing an issue cancels out its votes. I don't see that the votes are then resumed at the same level, so closing can easily be used to undo somebody's votes just because you disagree with them (I'd like some clarification).

This is a world that has many kinds of people in it, some of them paying a lot of tier a lot of tier and serving other customers. It is not just that one script kiddie who has all day to play on the JIRA can go around closing and moving other people's serious bug findings and proposals. If you don't agree with a proposal/bug, you can a) not vote for it b) comment on it c) start a better one.

The reason there is "rarely anyone to disagree" is that there is only a tiny cadre of lifers here working the JIRA, with the vast majority of members of the community either completely unaware of its existence – and the influence of this tiny handfull of people on their Second Lives – or unable to work its levers constantly even in support of their own proposal because they may not fully understand the arcane complexities of the JIRA mechanism itself.

If someone makes a silly feature request, it isn't voted on, no action is taken on it, and it sinks of its own weight, without anyone having to waste time on it. Proposals can age out after 90 days perhaps to solve the problem of "gold farming for news" – and BTW, I see nothing like that here on the JIRA now such as to warrant this faux concern.

In fact, sculpties were something put over on the community by the small group of coders, and had no significant awareness or support in the community, and indeed do make the building market unfair, suddenly introducing a new complexity that only some would be able to master and capitalize on.

We do not need volunteers that in fact control and subvert the proposals and findings of others constantly.

Indeed this is related to VWR 3071 and it is a prime example of a bug and feature issue that in fact does not fit under any of those categories that WarKirby is arrogating himself to "manage".

It is a legitimate proposal calling for a halt to the automatic default into search of all items for sale because people did not have a chance to decide to put every item into sale or not, and were not informed widely and properly of these options. A blog description of weeks ago in which this point was buried sure doesn't count.

Furthermore, the rationale for the concept was that UNTIL the bug could be fixed, causing non-transferable items once set to sale originally, and now in the buyer's ownership, still flag as set to sale, even though of course they cannot be sold because they are not transferable.

Until that bug is fixed, many, many items will show up as set for sale, unwanted in search, and causing invasion of privacy.

Perfect example of the type of action motivating this proposal. There is nothing specific to the WEB in this proposal, and it doe sindeed belong under MISC.

There is an issue that the people who frequent JIRA (including the Linden teams) are coders who do not appreciate economic issues, especially in defining Showstopper in purely technial terms, while happily letting an over-charging bug exist for months without being addressed, even when the solution has been given through JIRA comments. A case in point is the failure to address the various bugs in the website display of classifieds, some day a big spender will decide that they have had enough of being ignored and leave SL, and as a parting shot take out a suit against LL. The claim that Classifieds are paid in Lindens and therefore exempt from finanical law will just not stand up in a court when some advertisers are spending 100s of USD every week to purchase the Lindens to purchase the Classifieds. The moment that LL allowed Lindens to be purchased and sold they entered the world of financial law and some here on JIRA still need to wake up to that fact.

I've had Jira proposals moved by Billy No Mates and it makes me wonder if there's any point to this when Billy no mates can close or move a proposal.

Leaving aside the obvious issue, such as people like Prokofy Neva with an axe to grind, this proposal opens the door to such rubbish as:

"I propose that all female avatars have tits bigger than a G-Cup"

Think about it for a moment. Under this proposal people could not remove garbage like this even if it was evident it was a load of absolute rubbish. That's hardly democracy in action. I wonder how much Prokofy would be backing it if the JIRA proposal was "I propose calling Prokofy Neva a complete twat because that's what she is" or something equally insultive, because under this proposal even though that would be potentially libellous nobody could remove it from the JIRA without the authors consent - and what griefer would agree to have their axe-to-grind proposal removed?

Sorry, but no. There's no way I can support this proposal.

This is a generic issue that goes to the heart of what's wrong with the JIRA for the use of a diverse community with very many different needs and interests. And it's here we should take a stand.

The idea that it can be "gamed" or "griefed" is an argument used against having a "no" vote, too, but that's specious, as "yes" votes can be mobbed and gamed, too, just like the ability to close an issue needlessly. If there were a reputation system in which people could see that those who speciously close issues find them re-opened all the time, it might be possible to live without a "non-consent" system – but there isn't such a system.

Once again, frivolous proposals sink to the bottom. There are numerous unimportant, arcane, and frivolous proposals sitting open even now.

Abusive posts with vulgar words in them such as suggested by Untameable Wildcat would likely simply be removed by the Lindens for violating the TOS, and that alone would hardly be a reason not to propose the simple idea that only with an author's consent can a proposal be closed.

Either you appeal to people's reason and common sense, or you don't. I do : )

Most people have the good sense to concede that their issue must be closed if compelling arguments are made.

I'd like to confirm or deny that closing an issue cancels that issue's votes, so that reopening means the person has to go re-win all the votes again.

You're right... if I could close any issues, I would close this one without any doubts.

We don't need someone like you to invades JIRA and polices it.

1. Warkirby doesn't necessarily speak for me. I do'nt completely agree with that list of reasons he closes issues.
2. I am NOT a "script kiddie". I am NOT a purely techminded coder who has no understanding of the economics of SL. I earn my entire living in SL.
3. Mercia, I DID Resolve the issue, rather than Closing it. I even left a comment detailing my reasons for resolving it and giving tips on what prok should do when reopening it (which he ignored). Prokofy is the one who keeps insisting that I Closed the issue, which I definitely did not. I acted in what I thought was the best way to improve the issue so that it would be more helpful to LL, based on their guidelines. My actions were not unilateral; I can't force any issue change to stick, as Prokofy showed by reversing my change. I am perfectly willing to hear my reasoning refuted and see my actions reverted. I hate the idea of a revert-war powered by someone (Prokofy) who doesn't understand the system and decides that I'm out to get him.
4. While I did comment on VWR-3071 indicating why I disagreed with the issue, that was completely separate from my resolving it. They were two separate comments; one was giving my opinion, and one was acting based on the established JIRA conventions.
5. This proposal belongs under Web, with the jira.secondlife.com Component. That's where issues about this JIRA go.
6. Prokofy, please don't confuse your opinions with common sense. Not everyone agrees with your opinions or your definition of common sense.
7. Closing or Resolving an issue does not reset the votes. It's only the case that people cannot vote on an issue WHILE it is closed or resolved.
8. Community members perform a very important role in this JIRA by closing duplicate and incorrectly filed issues. We'd have even more of a flood of cruft than we do already without the efforts of those in the community to tidy up issues. It's critical that we all have the ability to edit any issue so that people cannot clutter this JIRA with incorrectly filed issues or use it as their soapbox. That's not what it's for.

This JIRA is community driven. I cannot possibly act unilaterally against the community's wishes, because the author of a proposal gets an email when I make a change, and all changes I make are plainly visible to anyone who wants to see them, by choosing "All" or "Change History" at the top of the comments. If I run around on a rampage closing issues (we've seen it happen), the community will quickly clean up after me and reverse my actions. In short, if you think I've done something wrong, appeal to the community.

More importantly, Prokofy, if you feel I've taken an action I shouldn't have on VWR-3071, please contact the Linden responsible for managing Jira, Rob Lanphier <robla@lindenlab.com>. Drop him an email and tell him why you think I acted badly. If he says I did, I'll gladly defer to his judgement. And if he says I acted properly, you need to defer to his judgement too. Don't try to lump him into your "bad guys" category of "coders".

Remember, JIRA is not your soapbox. It's not the place where LL looks for their list of things to do, and it's not a place where you can force LL to do anything. It exists for the community to work together to present technical issues and feature requests in the clearest way possible so that LL's developers can easily see what's wrong and fix it. It's not well suited to policy issues. For that, you might want to consider emailing a Linden directly.

Now, I'm done here. I definitely can't out-talk Prokofy, so he can have all the last words he wants. I'm ducking out before this turns into a flamewar. I hope those reading this will withhold judgement on me until they read the facts of the situation, rather than taking Prokofy's word for it that I'm evil.

Human nature is lazy. If people had to come and close issues themselves, even if they agree that it should be closed and was a bad idea, many of those people won't care enough to come back and actually do it.

Secondly, there are the stubborn people. Whether through inexperience, or simply sheer stupidity, I have seen some very absurd proposals here. Most importantly, some proposals which are technically impossible, and proposed by people who are unaware of this. Or even worse, people who think they know, and are actually clueless.

Lex's second point. I have considerable financial interest in SL too. And I want to make it better as much as anyone.

And as for this:

"In fact, sculpties were something put over on the community by the small group of coders, and had no significant awareness or support in the community, and indeed do make the building market unfair, suddenly introducing a new complexity that only some would be able to master and capitalize on. "

No. Just. No. For a VERY long time, people have been demanding more shapes, ability to import objects from outwith SL, subtractive geometry, and a million other ways to have better building. Sculpted prims are an answer to one of the biggest community demands ever, and can facilitate much better content creation in many ways. There is nothing unfair about liberating content creation from the limitations of SL's tools. SL is not designed to be fair, or balanced. This is not a game. This is a free market. If you can't keep up with technology, too bad.

It's about as logical as whining that guns make warfare unfair.

Lex Neva: it's completely specious to argue, "but I have no special power and anyone can close or reverse anything." It's a red herring. Obviously those with knowledge simply aquire power – and they acquire it without any rule of law here, and without any community spirit, that has respect for people's ideas and concerns. You're closing things "just because" you don't like them. And that's wrong. To prevent them from happening, there should be a flag of consent.

I don't understand why countering your arbitrary, unilateral activities here, and challenging the small cabal, is somehow making "a soapbox". It's merely a normal, common-sense challenge. Especially if all the votes for an issue get undone – or stopped for a time – by a close (can we confirm that?!), it's just plain wrong to undo people's efforts that way.

It's also completely unnecessary. There are gadzillion open issues here. No one wins any prizes for closing the most issues. It may satisify some inner sense of rectitude or geekitude to say there are less closed issues than open ones, but open issues are merely a sign of a vigorous community with many contributions, not a sign of laziness and congestion. It's not as if any list of open issues assaults the eye. You can filter it out! One could also build timers on issues, that if the owner doesn't refresh or get a vote or add some justification within 90 days, they automatically close.

I'm glad you earn your living in SL. But you don't earn it the same way many others do, with many other concerns than you have. And you don't get to run SL with only your concerns, of your class of people. It's just that simple.

The issue is NOT resolved. The problem of defaulting everything to search is wrong, until the bug is fixed, and until the community is consulted and has more time to adjust, at the very list. Unilaterally deciding "Oh, it's a feature, get stuffed" is just plain wrong. You don't get to do that. Forcing people to endlessly play a game of open and close is just plain ridiculous.

The revert war is so far powered by you, Lexa, not by me. I haven't reverted anyone's proposals. I've merely reopened a bug that you reverted.

It's not about any weird judgement of being "out to get". It's just plain normal democratic fair play and common sense. Could we inject a little of that here?! People should not get to go sweeping through the JIRA closing or moving people's items in this way without oversight or without any sense of the rule of law.

Common sense lets us know that in a community with a variety of opinions and different levels of understanding and knowledge, you cannot have a few speak for the many, and a few do things like shut off the very levers of expression. That's just dictatorship by a few, and it's wrong. It serves no purpose, either, to build knowledge and understanding of Second Life. Only an open system can do that.

Defaulting everything to search has many negative consequences. If someone doesn't feel them; if they don't understand them, that's fine, but they have to accept that for other people with whom they share Second Life it is indeed negative and destructive. That's just common consideration. More people agree with THAT basic notion than ever will agree with the idea that a handful of tekkies get to decide the priorities of Second Life.

I'd have to test whether the votes cancel out or hear it from a Linden, frankly, but even if votes are NOT lost on an issue, closing it means that days can be lost while it is closed and people get the idea that since it's closed, it's not worth voting on, and that's not good.

I'm quite capable of understanding why a few busybodies take it upon themselves to "clean up" everything in the notion that they represent the wisdom of the crowd. But...they don't. A timer that ends proposals without votes or refreshing by the owner can eliminate "cruft". Duplicates can be handled by having the motion to close that the author must respond to. You're acting as if the idea of having no one be able to close for another means no one can recommend for closure and gain consensus and common-sense consent. Of course they can. Most people would readily concede a common-sense explanation for a closure. My God, the search is so bad on the JIRA that even with the best intentions, you can inadvertently make a duplicate proposal. But you should get to be the final judge of whether it is duplicate and not the "gardeners" of the little circle here.

I don't see who died and elected you to be de-clutterers of the JIRA. If what you did was demonstrably good, it might not be challenged, But it's not. People complain, and not only me. And it's so patently obvious that you closed an issue just because you didn't agree with it. You think "just because" the Lindens or you said "this is how it's going to be – roll over" that a very controversial issue like this gets to be closed.

You have absolutely no idea how much static is building about how awful the search is. Boy, are you going to be getting in touch with this, soon.

You imagine that you are the reader of the community's wishes. But you are not. The history is not good enough. The action should not go forward. A proposal to close is all that should come in, and the person then consents, or doesn't. If he fails to act, it can close in 30 or 45 or 90 days, whatever.

No one should be expected to have to keep scampering around policing those with ill will closing their issues because they disagree with them. You have closed an issue not due to logic, duplication, or reason, but because you disagreed with it, so you have lost credibililty.

I'm not going to be running to a Linden to appeal each JIRA issue on a case by case issue. That sets a terrible precedent, and Lindens don't have time for that. I've put a proposal here. Vote on it or don't. Stop closing issues that you don't agree with. End of story.

As for "list of things to do," you are aware that the Lindens have THEIR OWN INTERNAL JIRA? And this is a kind of, oh, culdesac. It's an important place for feedback, but it is not where things are really decided.

So those who fight their way through the JIRA concept and do bother to mount a feature or bug should have some modicum of respect and not be closed until they consent. The solution to any concerns of clutter is just to put a timer on the issue.

If it were not possible to make proposals about things that somebody thought were "technically impossible," Philip Rosedale couldn't have implemented Second Life. It's hardly a reason for me to accept non-consent for closure.

The "people" who have "for a very long time" have been "demanding" these things are a tiny percentage of the overall users of Second Life. Consumers didn't stand around in throngs shouting, "Give us sculpties!" This is a designers and programmers wish, and it's fine as far as it goes, and it's great, but don't try to portray "the community" as the small percentage of those who design in it – and wanted this particular feature before all others.

I hardly see how something that involves tyranny of a few designers is called "a free market". It's not. This is not about "getting used to technology". It's about a few trying to force their will on the many and calling their refusal to go along with this tyranny "fear of technology". It's understandable that some people want better and more robust and groovy building tools and features, but it's not to everyone's advantage even in the design community and not even driven by some sort of rational consumer demand in a free market that can easily give signals. In fact, sculpties aren't taking off in the way you imagine because a) they rez funny as you land on a sim b) they are much harder to make c) you can't sit on them or climb up them, they have no firmness to them d) they actually look crappy as water in many places and many of the things made out of them look like drippy papier-machet. Sculpties have made some things look good; other sims look like mud. They are also affecting server performance more than textures on prims.

But what the heck makes anybody think they are the ones to "resolve" a jira post because of them seeing things different? Especially the other linked Jira - the one about opt-in instead of opt-out is a classic "different views on things" problem and nobody whatsoever should have the nerves to resolve such a jira just because he happens to be on the other side of an argument. that just plain stinks.

Requesting authors permissions to close/resolve/whatever a jira post might not technically feasible (I don't know what features Jira has underneath for that), but at least a clear policy change on the jira usage is in order. The "none of them will react to close jira's" is a void argument - nobody would request that all closing should run through author-response. The Lindens should be able to work on the Jira's as they need, including resolving and closing. It's the random-resident-close that needs moderation.

Mercia writes: Lex it was you who chose to continue an argument from another issue, this issue is not about your private spat wth Prokofy, this issue is about closing issues. You cited guidelines, Lex, that you often fail to follow (Warkirby the same). Several times recently I have been reopening Closed issues in order to Resolve them. Prokofy does not mention Resolving issues in this Issue.

Prokofy is quite entitled to set up a new issue on the basis of somethng that arises out of another one, several others do that as have I. It was you Lex who turned this Issue into a forum thread (aka flame). Please remember that this is a bug tracker. I am not sure what the problem with moving issues, and this Issue does belong in WEB, as jira is a subcategory of WEB. I wold have thought that the categpry being correct means that Linden Labs are more likely to notice it.

Also, you see a small cabal in everything, Prokofy. You have a very deserved reputation for being paranoid and acid tongued. Just because you say things, does not make them so. This "cabal" is open to anyone who wishes to help out.

Your comments about search, see to fail to notice one salient point. The search allows filtering out closed issues, and this is pretty much a necessary thing, to avoid having to wade through all the spam and duplicates. Closing issues allows them to not get in the way of searching.

Your comments about only designers wanting these things. Of course. The consumers don't know, or care how things are made most of the time. They just see new shiny stuff and buy it. And as for tyranny:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~elout/sculptpaint/

Sculptypaint. Free. Resident made. Many presets, to make easy sculpted prims. I personally don't know much about making them. But when I needed sculpted stairs, I used the built in stairs tool, and I had them, right there, without paying any designers. It is not tyranny to make nice things. Noone forces people to buy anything. And noone forces sculpted prims to be used.

You can sit on them quite fine if you use a sit target. And if you don't understand that, there are nice script tools to help with that too. And your point d refutes your own argument. If they look so crappy and useless, how can they be making anything unfair?

Also: "They are also affecting server performance more than textures on prims. "

What evidence do you have for this? The sim just sends a texture, the client renders it. Moreover, the sim treats them as spheres with regards to physics. Generally, sculpt maps are smaller than normal textures, too. So where is the effect on server performance?

I've never closed an issue on the basis of not agreeing with it. In such cases, I leave a comment, and move on.

If this particular issue is changed from MISC to WEB382 that is not so material, if there is some cogent case to be made for it – that is not what this very WEB382 is about however.

It's about a few people going around and closing or resolving issues against the will of the original poster and against any sense of the rule of law and common sense.

"Closing" or "resolving" amount to the same thing so it's silly to obsess about their technical differences on this JIRA, which we all grasp, that's not the point. The point is going against the consent of another resident "just because". It's the arbitrariness of this act that is striking quite a number of people, illustrating that it "isn't just me". It's a generic principle.

And I find that even if those doing the "closing" and "resolving" were in good faith, operating from guidelines and a sense of principle and responsibility to others, they could still be mistaken if they merely represent a "school of thought".

WarKirby, I'm quite away that in Lex's opinion, this "Linden policy" is "not a bug". But I'm here to explain that it is a bug – it's a flaw in their design that goes against the rest of the design. It's a mistake. I've made the argument already above.

Unfortunately, "bug" or "new feature" are the only modes one can use to address "problem with Linden policy". However, in this case, I think it is clear enough that it is a flaw in the design that one can pronounce it "bug". A policy turned into a feature without thought as to how it constitutes a flaw in design is a bug.

I don't see the need for turning this very ordinary process here with a proposal that you can take or leave into some sort of personal attack replete with claims of "acid tongues" blah blah. There is indeed a cabal here, as anyone can see by the arbitrary and wreckless closing and resolving and moving of features and bugs that people have to yank back and put as they were – it's an outrage. Anyone can see that. And the idea that "the cabal is open to anyone willing to help out" is ridiculous. It's open to lifer-coder types who have the time on their hands to obsess about this arcane and cumbersome mechanism. These people are unaccountable to the group. They can hide behind the notion of "we're just helping out here" endlessly, and yet they don't represent the will of the community and their help is not always needed and is sometimes counterproductive. While roughly under Linden supervision, the Lindens themselves don't seem to grasp what is needed for an entire community that consists not just of tekkies who want software to be a certain way merely to satisfy inner notions of symmetry or rectitude, without concern for users and actual field information.

If search allows filtering out closed issue, it can filter out open issues, too. Ask for that if you are bothered by the sight of open issues you don't like.

"The consumers don't know, or care how things are made most of the time. They just see new shiny stuff and buy it". Actually, that's not true. You might imagine it's true if you were in a corporate black box without feedback. Second Life is an interactive streaming 3-D world that enables feedback to come to you impeded. Here it is. Deal with it.

Sculpties have various nice manifestations. I have the free staircases, but of course they are a pain because they require figuring out how to weld prims on them so that residents can actually walk up them if needed to actual other heights, i.e. not just using them for "show".

I'm glad Barney has come on to express his points and return this discussion to what it is: a generic discussion about the propensity of some residents to close or resolve (they amount to the same thing) feature proposals and bugs that other residents do not think should be closed or resolved. The presence of some uneducated people who can't be persuaded to see their issue is duplicative or frivolous is not argumentation enough in favour of granting to a few unaccountable "helpers" this right to arbitrarily do what they like with a JIRA.

We can't have the Lindens bogged down with going around and closing issues, and frankly, they're likely to close or resolve for some of the same geeky reasons that don't reflect concerns of the entire community.

Nothing is lost by having a mechanism that requires user consent. Fears of clutter are unnecessary. Filters can be used. As noted, a timer can be put on issues to make them simply evaporate if no action has been taken on them in some set amount of time.

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Bug_triage/Monday_Agenda

There will not be a blanket policy against residents resolving issues. I really appreciate the work that Lex, WarKirby and others do to help work through the issues that come into JIRA.

Disputed issues are great to put on the agenda of a bug triage meeting.

I'll leave this open for now, but absent a viable suggestion, my recommendation will be to resolve this issue tomorrow.

Nobody should be forced into attending a "bug triage meeting" on each and every disputed policy in order to prevent it from wrongfully being closed.

What you should be doing, Rob, is representing the voice of reason and law and order, and warning WarKirby and Lex that they must cease closing issues arbitrarily merely because they disagree with them.

By giving them their head, you are merely reinforcing the insolent and condescending hacker culture at Linden Lab, and that will spell your doom.

Apologies in advance, too busy in RL to attend a triage.

I have never, and will never, close any issue arbitrarily. Whenever I close any issue, I always give a reason for it.

"A software bug (or just "bug") is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from behaving as intended (e.g., producing an incorrect result). Most bugs arise from mistakes and errors made by people in either a program's source code or its design, and a few are caused by compilers producing incorrect code. A program that contains a large number of bugs, and/or bugs that seriously interfere with its functionality, is said to be buggy. Reports detailing bugs in a program are commonly known as bug reports, fault reports, problem reports, trouble reports, change requests, and so forth."

From Wikipedia. The definition of a bug. Linden policy decisions are not bugs. For that matter, they are not new features either, but new feature is the most suitable category. There is no perfect category because jira is not intended to debate policy. There is no defined medium for arguing against or debating policy, and as a result, those discussions often end up here.

This also, brings to a second point.
"You are taking a biased and wrongful position, Rob, and bolstering an arbitrary and unlawful behaviour of a handful of residents. "
Biased and wrongful is your opinion. . I have already commented on your repeated and incorrect use of arbitrary, and as for unlawful. Please point me to the constitutional amendment that grants you the right to have issues on jira. Or a congressional act. A bill of law. Etc. This is a matter of corporate policy, not law.

"What you should be doing, Rob"
I'm not sure about Rob, but I wouldn't like people telling me how to do my job, personally

Naturally WarKirby will imagine that his ministrations here are all to the good. No one person can be expected to be unbiased in this manner, however. It's very important to have some checks and balances in this system, unless it's supposed to be a tyranny. So where are they? Where is the recourse? Where are Linden guidelines and oversight? Instead, what we're getting is Linden applause for arbitrariness, and that's worrisome.

I think we as tier-payers and participants in the world of Second Life simply must be able to tell people how to do their jobs. It's just normal in any system to have a sense of what the rule of law is, and when people deviate from it.

In this case, over the past 5 days this issue has garnered in total 3 votes. This is after having been posted to Prokofy's rant site. It would seem to me that even the people who frequent the site mentioned, those people most likely to agree to this proposal, do not find merit in it.

In this, as in many other issues, we have one person attempting to assert control over the processes that Second Life operates under. This person uses the excuse that an elite cabal, a FIC, or many various other names, is already doing the exact same thing. The difference between the two factions is that the singular person makes it a point to stand up and proudly declare "I am Prokofy Neva and this is how I say things must be done". Where the group she denigrates, insults, and constantly attacks on any public forum that allows her, works quietly, works democraticly and quite frankly.. they just work instead of preach.

There are policies on how the JIRA is managed, some people may not be familiar with them.. and yes at times, people make a mistake. These aren't personal attacks on you because your name is "Prokofy" and you have the right to undo any change someone makes to any issue you make on JIRA, including opening an issue that a Linden has closed.

Could things be better? Quite possibly so. But they aren't going to get better doing it the Prokofy way.

I have never claimed to be perfect, or not make any mistakes. Yes we have measures in place to counter abuse. A change history tracks all changes, which can be easily reverted. You can be notified by email of any changes to your issues.

Lindens are watching constantly. You have screamed and complained about lack of linden judgement, and when a linden, the head of Jira no less, has come in and said something you don;t like, you are quick to dismiss his word and demand that you are STILL right. There is still no arbitrariness. I have still not closed issues without a reason.

Your last line is overflowing with self rightousness. Linden Lab is not a government authority. It is not elected., It does not have a duty to provide anything. Linden lab is a private company. Second Life is a corporate property, and Linden Lab has the right to do it's job any way it pleases, and make any laws it wishes. You have the right to not pay them money if you don't like it.

up until now, I have been unaware of the difference between closing, and resolving. I know now. Clearly, Prokofy is also unaware. Lex resolved your issue about the showing in search. The purpose of resolving is to pass back to the reporter for more work. Ie, to make it a feature request.

Lack of participation in this vote even when mentioned in my blog doesn't mean anything but this: the JIRA is too complicated, and too intimidating to use. Few would want to step into it.

I haven't demanded that anything be "my way". I've suggested a process whereby people can contribute without fear or favour. Confident in the knowledge that any Linden favourties will undo what they've just spent all this time proposing or finding as a bug. That's all.

I don't see why a Linden who is "the head of JIRA" merely gets to come and say "I say I support my fanboyz, and too bad for you" and not invoke any kind of overarching principle. I don't see why a Linden gets to be right merely because they are a Linden, nor do "helpful good citizens" get to be right just because they are dubbed so by those in power.

They can only be right if they make good sense and have logical and persuasive argumentation. "Closed because I say so" isn't that. My proposal is a failsafe to that happening – and happen, it sure does, and if Soft Linden has trouble seeing that, she should be challenged to come up with a list of specious proposals that refused closure when explained the reasoning with logic.

Gigs Taggart declaring by fiat isn't logic. It's just fiat. Especially when the bug descriptions don't match.

Where are the guidelines for features, as Mercia accurately and rightly asked?

Linden Lab is indeed a governing authority. It will be open-sourcing this software in due course and is now laying down the values, guidelines, norms, and procedures for an entire Metaverse. No corporation gets to do what it pleases, we've seen time and again now (casinos, gambling, ageplay) that in fact RL law does intervene.

I find often that those squawking loudest and most indignantly that Linden Lab is a corporation are the very people who want it to stay this way with a closed, authoritarian, and arbitrary nature so that they can benefit by that set-up as the insiders. That's all.

I understand the difference between closing and resolving, and I do not agree with it. There's a difference.

Can you please provide a list of issues where you think there there is a frivolous proposal or illogical proposal or false bug find that you felt just had to be closed?

I'd like to see just how bad a problem this is. I'm not persuaded.

As for a list, I have three for you right away : )

VWR 3071
VWR 3071
WEB 382

Other posters here have complained about having their issues closed/falsely resolved/moved.

If you want to allow that to go on, whether or not you agree that goes on, then say so. My proposal offers a way to prevent that from happening so that people are not discouraged from participating.

I myself thought that surely, among the resolved issues, I'd have to peer long and hard to come up with say, 1 example beyond my own examples which I believe to be very good examples of items closed and "resolved" when they aren't really.

I was actually quite shocked to find that many of the issues in the RESOLVED list have been arbitrarily closed, moved, or falsely resolved by both Lindens and good citizens. It really boggled my mind and let me know things are worse than I knew.

Here's just a sample, with my comments:

o SVC-114
Please Report Inventory Loss Progress on SL Blog

Torley has falsely declared victory, and ignored the purpose of the OP, who wanted REPORTS, not PR characterizations of hard-working Lindens. Hamilton has not reported for more than a month, since the 10/12 "reduction initiative". What has he been doing all this time?! A wiki is no comfort here.

o WEB-247 on terminology, much like Ordinal's WEB-380 (perhaps even dups?)
Torley once again comes in as spin-meister, falsely declaring victory. The terminology definitely needs to be changed, and it should be in the power of the users of this version of JIRA and JIRA's original makers to do this. As has been pointed out, it's especially misleading giving the RESOLVED usage on the blog which means "WE REALLY FIXED IT TODAY AT LEAST". Here it means nothing, more like "we want it to go away".

Indeed, the "resolved" on the JIRA seems to mean "we don't like it in the list any more because we're tired of it and couldn't fix it". There's a simple solution here: stop marking things as resolved! They aren't! Just add another term like "in discussion" or "pending more info".

o VWR-1752. Nicholas Beresford gives in too easily and goes against his own notion to label this a wontfix, and makes it resolved – thought it wasn't. I fully agree with him that a double click to wear an object is a huge boon especially for newbies, not something so easily error-prone as imagined and...didn't it used to work this way?! To take off, you just right click on yourself and go on the pie menu. Not so hard.

o VWR – 2811 "Lindens aren't going to do what this bug asks" Gigs Taggart. LOL – but they did! And see my further commentary on 2811.

No, Alexa and Soft, you just aren't seeing what's going on here: an overcompensatory, and over-compulsive desire to portray things as "closed/resolved/fixed" merely for symmetry's sake, to declare false victories on the JIRA.

This isn't science. It's not good governance. And it's not good software development, either.

The call for information was to show the widespread abuse of this power. What you have shown instead are two issues both filed by yourself, one of which is this very same issue. This casts a very bad light on this proposal as a whole as it is a severe indicator of a personal issue, versus an issue that is widespread and affects a the JIRA in a extremely negative manner.

As for my being a contrarian. That is a subjective view, as it only appears to be so to you as it is you I do not agree with.

NOTE: SVC-114 is the wrong JIRA tag, the correct tag should have been WEB-276

By the list of issues given as example it seems your complaint is that Lindens close issues and people close their own issues.

These items are all in the RESOLVED list. They shouldn't be marked RESOLVED.

Nope, Lindens closing and the OP themselves clothing are bad signs of people under pressure to conform and show false symmetry. Very bad science.

Lindens are indeed arbitrarily closing things for reasons that are completely not justifiable – that's wrong. SVC-114 is indeed a valid item as it requests reporting – that in fact didn't come. Torley tried to mollify this OP with some blather about a wiki and a month-old initiative that had no fresh reporting. Sorry, no sale.

Gosh, I'm in a hall of mirrors here. VWR 3071 which was arbitrarily closed is now suddenly granted "supeceding" status?! Huh? 2811 was marked wontfinish, and we have a case of "dueling Lindens" here because another Linden claims there is a patch ready to ship in 4 weeks. Go know.

This is like the lady with diabetes in "Andromeda Strain". Scary.

And as for Torley trying to molify the origional poster with their post. If you would review the dates of the origional submission and the comments made you would see that the things Torley posted were the result of this issue and not something to wave at a newly submitted issue.

And yes VWR-3071 seems to supercede 2811, you'll notice, if you look at it, that an Internal Linden Lab ID was associated with the item after you re-opened it.

SVC-114's OP asked for a comprehensive, coherent report about the status of this initiative. There has been no posting about the status of this initiative as a whole. The deployment of one fix for one kind of inventory loss is no comfort whatsoever to the hordes of people who have lost inventory, including my tenants. It boggles the mind that a simple request for a comprehensive report about the entire initiative in all its parts could be somehow "mistaken" for some little patch for only one form of the issue. The wiki is a sop. It takes two common problems that lead people to feel they have inventory loss (coalesced objects and failure to clear cache) and imagines that this makes up the bulk of inventory loss. Not true. I know from constant user education of my tenants on this score that most people have done these tips, and have emerged from them unsuccessful (myself included) so they persist with inventory loss reports. To palm these people off on a wiki with tips is cruel. The survey is of little good because many people never heard of it, and no report on its results, two weeks later, has been forthcoming. The Linden on this project could simply reappear with a follow up saying, "Hi, everybody, I'm not getting much response on my survey or conversely, I have a huge response on my service, so I either a) need more response or b) more time to crunch it. We have none of this. Two lines are all that is needed!

Torley is mollifying. Anyone can see it. This ended up in resolved. It's not.

VRW 3071 was closed arbitrarily, so I have to laugh again at its new wonderful status as "superceder of 2811".

So...I'm to conclude then, that only if I persist and persist, and keep reopening my arbitrarily closed item, that I will final get an Internal Linden Lab ID, the Holy Grail of the JIRA game?

Um. Ok.

As I've stated before, SVC-114 is merely the label under which is appears in the "resolved" list, so that's the label under which I'm discussing the principle of the matter here.

The essence of the matter is about the OP's request, and Torley's argumentation against even persisting with any kind of request like that. It doesn't matter if it is subsequenty labelled "tuna fish". The principle of the matter stands, as an example of how an issue gets moved, changed, relabelled – anything but admitted as an issue.

You have only to read the irritated and annoyed reports of residents who are losing inventory to understand that you cannot have an issue like this marked "resolved" so casually just because you're tired of hearing from them. One poster even made the obvious point that it was hard to repro a bug on a lost item after you...already lost it. And people were losing items even after replacing them.

WEB-276 was a request made in August for a blog post updating the community on the progress of the issues linked to SVC-114. That request was filled and the issue was closed.

And yes, providing the correct issue ID is important, as the issue you provide and keep providing has no link to the issue you are discussing. It isn't linked as related or as a duplicate. The only link is a direct reference to SVC-114 in the body of WEB-276.

The issue you link to does not support your position. The I have provided you the correct ID for the issue you meant to use. You refuse to correct yourself simply because I have posted things that refute your position. And acknowledging it as the correct ID would be acknowledging that you made a mistake.

And yes this is the "substance of the matter" as it was requested that more information be provided for specific issues that you, or anyone else actually, felt showed abuse JIRA for moving, closing and/or resolving issues. I could very easily have not provided the correct Issue ID. But I did, so your complaint would make more sense as it was the issue you were discussing.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-276

It appears in the resolved list as WEB-276, but is under the meta-issue. It's merely been referred to as this, and that is NOT THE POINT. As noted, it could be called "cream cheese".

A huge annoyance on the JIRA is this kind of pedantic literalism and word-fisking. The impugning to me of "inability to admit a mistake" or other wierd assumptions based on your own preoccupations are completely out of line here.

As I've stated now 4 times: it doesn't matter what it is labelled. It was referred to exactly by the numbers that appeared in the RESOLVED list. What's operative here is NOT how the issue is labelled. What's operative is that the substance of the issue, regardless of its number of label is NOT resolved and cannot be resolved in the facile way in which it has been reported as resolved.

It's abuse of the JIRA to a) declare a case like that resolved and b) to harass me for an "incorrect" reference when I've merely referred to it exactly as it appears in the resolved list at the first level, and the second level when you click on it.

It's a perfect example of the problem here.

He gets to say that because he's the "head" of the jira project. The same as the "owner" of a parcel of land gets to decide who has access to it.
Lindens get to be right because this site is owned and maintained by them. Because SL is owned and maintained by them.

"Dear Alexa – right back at you:"

No. You don't get to do that. You came here and started this crusade. The burden of proof is on you. Alexa doesn't have to justify linden policy to you. You've been given an opportunity to prove your point. It's your responsibility to make your case.

And you have spectacularly failed to do so.
You were asked to do the following:

Alexa Linden - 19/Nov/07 03:24 PM
Prokofy, can you please provide a list of issues where the current ability has been abused?

And in case you forgot, the current ability is that anyone can close an issue. As opposed to only the author or lindens, which is what you ask .AT least I hope so. I hope you're not seriously asking that lindens be disbarred from closing issues too.

Now. The arguments you have presented:

VWR - 3071 Resolved for being marked as a bug.
WEB - 382 Resolved by a linden. Asking for more info on signs of abuse.
SVC - 114 is still open, and has never been closed or resolved.
WEB - 247 resolved by a linden
VWR - 1752 resolved by author
VWR - 2811 steve linden indicated it would not be changed,. Gigs acted upon that.

There are only two there which were not closed by lindens, or the issue's author. One is based upon the universally recognised definition of a bug.
And one is based on linden words.

I'm sorry, but that's just not logical or scientific. Lindens can be wrong, and they'll be the first to tell you that – they often have more humility than their fiercely loyal fanboyz, if you read their blog.

I'd like to remind everyone that this JIRA is in Beta. That means we get to criticize it. That means we get to really rip the hell out of it. It's in Beta. Furthermore, the new Search, an elaborate project, is also in Beta. That means we get to criticize it. That means we get to rip the hell out of it.

It's simply unacceptable to adopt a supine posture regarding Linden righteousness given what is at stake, which is our world which we pay for and given an entirely different prospect on the project now: SL is going open source.

So while the Lindens can threaten, ban, mute, close, expel, etc. they can't do that forever, especially if they're wrong.

The JIRA needs a feature that prevents its arbitrary misuse, and I've proposed one, and suggested time-outs as another feature. The JIRA definitely needs overhauling – it not total scrapping, especially as to the feature proposals aspect of it, if it is to be a viable community tool for modifying the world collaboratively. It is not that now except for a few who seized control of it.

I've given Alexa a perfectly fine list – and I'm confident I can go right down the list and keep churning more examples, most of which hinge on one, central problem: the concept of the meaning of the word "RESOLVED".

I'd like to hear from Alexa and/or Soft, and not others, because the principles I've outlined are sound.

VWR 3071 has argumentation explaining that flawed design with uintended consequence is a bug; if that argumentation is not persuasive to you, that's understood, but that doesn't "resolve" it as the invasion of privacy still stands as an issue.

WEB 382 has been granted at least 4 examples where it has been abused – closed too soon, closed under community pressure, closed irrationally, etc.

SVC 114 is merely the meta tag for a legitimate issue that stands, which is not resolved namely the reporting on inventory loss.

VWR 2811 is acted upon by James, not ultimately by Steven, though the dueling Linden problem remains, and may not be overriden by Gigs.

If somebody wants to play "let's drill down the resolved list and find more," I can play it all night. The issues stand, however:

o vague and unproductive and even destructive use and misuse of the word RESOLVED. This needs deep and wide clarification

o premature declaration of victory over very complex problems that are not served by such "resolutions"

o closure under pressure of others though issue remains valid (double click to have clothing worn)

o declaration of invalidity for political reasons on perfectly legitimate proposals that could merely be left alone to gather votes – or not.

I didn't say that "ONLY" an author should close an issue (or a Linden as masters of the JIRA). I said that the author's CONSENT should be sought, that it couldn't be closed without their consent. That is different. That shows that the author has a role, and if he does not consent, then this tugging back and forth of closing and opening is avoided.

Ultimately, another procedure can be created for stand-offs – Linden resolution, time-outs, etc.

The perfect example of this. Used the world over as an information resource. Completely open and free for anyone to edit. And likewise moderate. Abuse is prevented by the many who go in and fix vandalism.

This was exactly the pernicious reasoning used to destroy the Feature Voting Tool.

Ciaran, I wouldn't advocating having only Lindens close issues. They will instantly say "it can't scale" and "we don't have the staff" as they do with every single community effort like this, whether forums or whatever. And then the busybodies who have the time to become what they call "good citizens" and whom we call "fanboyz" prevail with their often sectarian view. They are fiercely loyal to the Lindens, and the Lindens are fiercely loyal to them, and they can do no wrong, because they need them to do this scut work. It's really a sordid little system and they won't admit it is that, and it makes it worse.

I'd suggest having proposals time out, if you don't add a justification or a challenge to a motion to close, or move it yourself, then it closes – and if you do move that it not be closed through a switch of some kind, then only in those cases, which should be minimal, would a Linden intervene. It's not a great failsafe, but it seems to me it could prevent abuse.

This is a BETA. We should be critiquing it. This celebration and institutionalization of a perfectly ridiculous and pernicious system for running complex public project needs to be revised, if not overthrown.

The Lindens demanding "more information" and "proof" that arbitrary closures happen on the JIRA are former residents, and belong to a certain school of thought about all this – it's not a question asked entirely in good faith. It's meant to minimize the problem and provide a technical solution to the political issue: see, there's no issue, so there.

But a) regardless of whether there was any proof it would still be a generic issue of governance and b) there is proof and plenty of sentiment from those who were targeted for closures.

The proposal involves making a policy, or making technical means that either time out proposals, or make a lever where "consent" has to be triggered. So someone recommends something for closure by starting a "close action," but then the author has 30 days to hit a lever for "agree" or "disagree". Of course, the JIRA's framers and Kool-Aid drinkers loathe the concept of "no". They hate free will. They hate "I disagree" as a dissent against the "majority" which is usually manufactured. So it may be very hard to get this to function. Still, by raising the issue, the Lindens can begin to develop a policy – when they see the few cases that spark controversy and they see people constantly trying to close and re-open, they can call off their aggressive watchdogs and keep the issue open.

As Ciaran rightly says, the vast majority of issues recommended for closure are likely to be routine, i.e. support issues which regrettably aren't allowed here (a total flaw in the design, since hundreds of people complaining legitimately on the JIRA about their frozen accounts and these God-awful billing issues are actually a triumph of democratic will using even this horribly sequestered JIRA tool to main their legitimate will known).

However, there is a significant minority, more than the in-group is prepared to admit, of questionable actions, which the unbiased can see by merely perusing the list. I immediately came up with 4; anybody looking at it in good will would come up with more.

There is an underlying ethic here which doesn't serve the community at all. That's the meme of the altruistic good citizien who always goes around cleaning sandboxes or warning people they will be autoreturning or closing, and helping people. Nobody ever questions such do-gooders because they are needed to do the gruntwork of Second Life. Yet such people often have a horribly invested and stubborn ego in this process and engage in this work to get reputational enhancement which they jealously guard. It means you can never pry them away from their self image (one that a small band calling itself "the community" zealously upholds) and ever prove them wrong, even when they demonstrably are wrong.

There seems to be a dynamic where cleaning up the JIRA, making it look neat and tidy, closing issues someone finds "irregular," de-cluttering it, making it look like "progress is happening" etc etc are all things mitigating against it really functioning to do what it should: serve as a means for residents to report what is broken about SL, and propose new ideas for features. The task of improving Second Life itself and accurately reporting it as broken – and still broken - becomes subsumed under the greater altruistic task of Keeping the JIRA and the Keepers of the Keep then fend off anything that mars their symmetry.

I don't care about the JIRA being cluttery and not-shiny. If it has gadzillion proposals that enthusiastic people fielded to try to make SL better, so what? if they sink down without votes, and never get action, so what? That doesn't mean they need to be closed. Ideas can take a while to gain support. Features almost by default nature should never, ever be closed except by Lindens.

And frankly, THAT was a central thesis of the Feature Voting Tool gutted by Angel Fluffy. You could keep your vote open and collect votes – and no one could close it! And once you had a threshold of 500, Lindens were expected to respond. And THEY would decide whether it was feasible or not, not some "good citizen" with his own agenda. And frankly, if the Lindens were out of step with the vox populi, people would rephrase and re-do the issue again, often going through a number of variants to find at least some part of the idea that would gain support.

THAT element is entirely missing from the JIRA – no accident, comrade.

So you see, there is already an existing system for handling such abuse. And unlike the system you proposed, Prokofy, it doesn't decrease the signal-to-noise ratio of the PJIRA to the point of uselessness.

If you have a specific list of cases where the ability to close/resolve issues was used maliciously, give them, and perhaps the abuser(s) will be disciplined.

Otherwise, let it go and move on. (That goes for everyone here, I think.)

The idea that you report people for "abuse" when they are merely explaining why they think bugs are bugs and should be important, or defending their idea for a feature is just ludicruous. This issue has repeatedly and maliciously been closed, but "reporting" people isn't the answer.

The answer is to make a system whereby the author's consent can be a buffer against not only abuse and malicious, but bias and stubborness and refusal to tolerate other's ideas.

I've already given a list of issues, Jacek, including this one. I don't call for people to be "discliplined," I call for an end to arbitrary, politicized, sectarian closures and I urge that a fail-safe to be put in by allowing the author's consent to be a factor in closures.

My God, the JIRA is in beta. I don't understand the haste and aggressiveness with which people try to close and finish off issues they don't like or offend them as "clutter" or whatever.

You're the one who needs to let go anything you don't agree with – let it go, Jacek, let it gather votes or not, just leave it alone.

The first two lines of the above post are her skewed version about how she was an innocent victim, persecuted by the mob

>_>

As for progress happening, try looking at all the patches that come in. The bugs that are fixed in each new release.
Your comment about support issues is irrelevant. Listen carefully.

Jira is NOT a governmental tool.
Jira is a technical organisation tool.
IT is designed to neatly order technical issues.

Banned and frozen accounts can still contact LL support. If you want to spread the word about something, there are millions of resident sites, forums, blogs, etc. Jira is a tool for technical issues.

The 500 vote threshold of the FVT was rarely honored. And it's also a poor way to do things. To require massive community votes to do something is silly. As that means only things which affect a lot of people visibly will get fixed, and lesser, simpler things will get ignored. Farthermore, there are the ideas which are popular, but unfeasible. People have been demanding writyeable notecards forever. But it's not possible to do, without completely overhauling the asset system. LL does not have the resources to implement many of the massive pipe dreams that hog all the votes.

The FVT also had the problem of limited votes. The 10 global votes thing was utterly ridiculous.

The list of issues you gave out has been refuted several times already. They do not prove the point at all.

And this issue is not something people can just let go. This is not an addition, something people will; not notice. This is a stupid idea that will destroy a well designed system, and permanantly hamper the progress of SL. People CANNOT simply let go, and allow you to have your way. Doing so would affect everyone.

SVC-125

Closed by Darling Brody because she didn't agree with it.
Guess what happened.

Yeps. It was reopened.

And has been open since. Recieved over 60 votes. Her abuse was crushed by the community, who want this fixed.

That is all the checks and balances we need.

This very issue Web 382 has been repeatedly closed for absolutely no good reason, "just because" somebody disagrees it, so that alone is good enough example, along with VWR 3071 and 3072, which shouldn't be closed, either. Just because they're mine doesn't invalidate them; but there are many more than mine and many more people complaining.

There isn't any such thing as "the community" – there is your little community of likeminded and likely I could declare "the community" to be some other set of people and yet a third and a 100th. The people who use Second Life do not constitute one community that agrees on everything gasp. You will have to accept that, and stop invoking this putative and mythic "community" as being a "check and balance". It isn't a sufficient check and balance on you.

People shouldn't have to battle "the little community" on the JIRA that keeps closing things. The corrective to the problem of the oppressive collective like that is to make a mechanism for individual consent. You need not fear it so much as you do. It just means that people who collect votes, who make a good proposal, don't have to battle little sects and cranks who close their issue merely because they disagree with it. It's a failsafe to ensure the individual rigthts needed for a democracy, which yes, this simply must be because it is going open source, it won't be the property of one company.

If features time out, if the consent is contingent on a timer, it will ensure there is no clutter.

Listen carefully yourself, WarKirby, as your ideas are merely your ideas, they do not reflect the will of the majority or even any sizeable faction:

Re: "Jira is NOT a governmental tool" – of course it is a governance tool, and the feature voting tool being folded into it indeed makes it that, and the voting feature of it, that decides which bugs are more important to this putative "community". It is frequently referenced by the Lindens as a governance tool, and indeed it is; that's why you and just a few people cannot run it, that's not democratic. In fact, the way it is being misused is good reason to take the FVT out of it again.

Do you like the idea of it "not be a governmental tool" precisely so that you can take charge of it without dissent?

Re: "Jira is a technical organisation tool" – yes, I realize that some people delight in reflecting these tools as "merely technical" and even to keep them deliberately complex so that only "the experts" and "the technical" can get to run them, and make political decisions on behalf of the many. No. And no again. You don't get to do that. The tools are inadequate and needlessly complex, and the job of fixing and prioritizing bugs and proposing features is NOT repeat NOT one that can be left to a tiny handful of volunteer coders, sorry to rain on your parade.

Re: "It is designed to neatly order technical issues. Yes, I realize that people and their free wills and democratic voice, and democracy itself is "messy". And that it mars your "neat, orderly technical tool" here by disagreeing with you, finding priorities that you don't find to be important, and so on. But you'll have to accept a bit of clutter and disagreement even within your own narrow circle, it seems, and in a broader and diverse community with many different stakes in Second Life, you'll have to accept that there will have to be compromises.

There is no need to imply that someone has to be forcibly banned and ejected from the community where they have stake, that this is "ok" (it's not) and that they can "make do" with third-party sites. That's wrong.

It doesn't matter if the threshold of the FVT was ever honoured. Indeed, the FVT did need reform but didn't need to be reformed out of existence! If you think that "massive community votes" are silly, then why are we looking at even 100 or 200 votes, in a place where votes are very hard to muster, given how obscure the JIRA is?! Why aren't those silly in your book too!

It's good that in a large community, things that affect a lot of people visibly do get fixed. Unless I had finally stormed the triage and JIRA, the bug that was annoying thousands of people advertising on the classifieds with a cascading SAVE CHANGES completely unnecessary dialogue introduced by one crank as a fix for something only he thought was broken would never have been fixed and made bearable. And that's really scary. That means in the name of getting air time for smaller less popular bugs that developers find important and the masses don't, the masses have been entirely shafted. There has to be a balance, and right now we are skewed back to having bugs that affect and inconvenience millions – like the objects showing up for sale that people don't know are going to be for sale! – are constantly "closed". It's insane!

It doesn't matter if notecards are "impossible" to do. And it's important that the Lindens see what in fact the pipedreams are that people do want, because frankly, if they aren't willing to overhaul their systems to bring them about, other companies will. We're now in that climate where that will indeed happen. Somebody starting from fresh can indeed make it! So it's actually in the Lindens interest to see what the mind of the communities is, and what different groups find important.

The limited number of votes on the FVT could have been reformed, as I will suggest; no need to kill it off completely as has been done, rendering it complex and therefore useless.

The list of issues I gave out have not been refuted. I've cited the argumentation again and again. Not a single persuasive argument has been cited. I'm definitely not immune to persuasive arguments, but they haven't been given. Instead, what I've seen is heavily politicized arguments, not factual arguments, and arguments that take some small factoid, like the labelling of the issue with the meta issue, to try to render it null.

I don't see how providing for the author's consent is a stupid idea. Author's consent was built into the FVT and it isn't what wrecked that system. All you have to do is to time it out if the person doesn't respond to a motion to close – it's enabling people not to have to keep coming back and forcing open their issue again and having their votes freeze, and also have them not have to make sure they don't miss a closure if they can't get logged on – sometimes the JIRA doesn't work, and people give up.

This isn't about "having my way," and your seeing it in that way, WarKirby, lets me know that you see your proposals and your successes here as "having your way". And that's exactly what's wrong with it. What I've proposed is an idea that is good for the system, to make this system less tyrannical and less destructive of proposals and bug prioritization, so that people have a fighting chance to get ideas through. It shouldn't have to take storming as I've seen now that it does. It should be a normal procedure whereby even ideas that the small minority of coders who rule the JIRA don't like have a chance to succeed.

With respect to bugs, it's very important that the community help identify and resolve duplicates, unclear issues, and other items so that its easier to find the actionable bugs. The current process, while not perfect, is worlds better than what is proposed here. Based on the copious debate here, there's little evidence that there's much support for changing it.

With feature requests, there's more room for debate. I'm happy to discuss this at one of the next open source meetings (see https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Source_Meeting ).

It's disingenous to describe this issue as having "copious debate" around it, as only a handful of people – 9 residents in total to be exact – have debated it, and most of them were on one side of the issue, and representing the aggressively-obedient status quo here among the JIRA regulars.

It's also unfair to say there's "little evidence that there's much support for changing it" when it has been debated in an obscure place with arcane tools by a handful of people, most of them in the magic circle and themselves engaged in the very action of closing issues they don't like – constantly. In fact, several tried to close this issue.

This issue has been posted for a mere 7 days and has 5 votes, hardly anyone is even aware of what is involved in posting on the JIRA, and having your proposal undone, often without your knowledge or consent.

"The community" you imagine goes busily about resolving, identifying duplicates, etc. etc. doesn't have the support of all aspects of the larger community of SL as a whole, because their interests as dev helpers are not the same interests as other groups, like merchants.

I'm glad you're willing to entertain more debate about consent for feature requests, because it is there that politicized closures and false resolutions take place more often. However, the debate should be about Web-399, moving the Feature Voting System entirely out of the JIRA, or at least, the JIRA as it functions now with unfriendly user-face and no "no" vote and not consent for closures/moves/merges, etc.

Actually, I can't think of a more sure way to ensure the killing of a proposal by subjecting it to the regulars who show up at the soi-disant "open-source meeting".

I've cited 4 others and I keep getting the runaround on them.

I did actually do as Alexa asked, and pointed to four very plain, obvious issues that were obviously monkeyed with. I'd like Alexa to look at them in good faith.

And not to be pedantic but it's been 11 days, not 7

I can't speak for everyone else here, but I AM a merchant. I am a full time SL content creator. I also own a fair bit of land, and contribute payments to a lot more.

Stop trying to alienate us as "them". We are normal SL residents like everyone else.

I've seen Jira used as it is here, as an outward-facing customer issues tracking portal, at two companies at which I've worked. This is by far the busiest and best-managed instance of the three.

Until reading this issue, I've been generally impressed at the judgement shown by JIRA users.

Prokofy: with all due respect to your communication skills and passion, both are better applied to social action issues inworld - this is very close to engineering, and you are well outside your field of expertise.

Lindens: please do not approve this proposal - it would degrade the usefulness of this tool for residents.

nika, sorry, but engineers do not get to run societies in the real world, and there is no justification for having them run virtual worlds merely because they are online and digital. I'm afraid you are well outside your field of expertise as a tekkie, if you imagine that what goes into making societies and the governance of them involves merely tools and bug lists. The JIRA absolutely sucks as a governance tool for all the reasons I've stated – features that involve sometimes clashing interests cannot be developed and resolved by a yes/no toggle switch and an open/close button, and far from degrading the feature discussion, it would finally enhance it and bring about more participation.

Nothing I've heard from any of you – any of you, including Lindens! – indicates that you want more participation from ordinary people from all walks of life. Indeed, you want them to stay away, as you imagine this is a job "very close to engineering" that many wannabee programmers want to use to show off in.

Beezle, as I've said umpteen times, there is no wait, because I'd have the proposals simply time out. My God, that ought to be the easiest thing on this JIRA, making a proposal auto-close after 30 days due to time out so that it is removed from your pristine view, if open issues trouble you so. In fact, even if for some technical reason you couldn't auto-close after 30 days without action, i.e. author action to modify/edit/move etc, you could still enlist the busybodies who love cleaning up garbage to manually close them all on a dated schedule.

Far from preventing people from launching agendas, the failure to have individual rights on the JIRA – including the woeful abrogation of rights on the old Feature Voter where thousands of ideas got destroyed without notification – has led to a situation where a small group feel they can tell others to get lost because they are "outside their field of expertise".

There was never any coders' elitism in the old Feature Voting System – and it is absolutely appalling that it creep in now.

Professional behaviour doesn't have to include being snobbish, condescending, narrow-minded elites. There shouldn't be the neuralgia about questioning anything on this JIRA that there is if in fact it truly is the professional and scientific thing you claim. The comment-fisking, literalism, sniping, barely-repressed hatred, etc. that goes on here belies the fact that it is anything but scientific, and has the earmarks of a cult.

The hysteria that the Keepers of the JIRA feel about the simple, ordinary, normal, plain, everyday, common-sense, democratic action of saying "No" is very, very troublesome. In an interface where filters and topics and searches can easily be made, it's insane to be so troubled by the fact that proposals that people have placed and kept active for 30 days should not be closed without their consent. There's no objective reason for it that I can see anywhere.

What we can reliably say about this issue is that engineers are the problem, however.

Note: "Rob Linden - 26/Nov/07 04:01 PM
We'll leave this issue open for the time being. However, we are not likely to make the proposed change."

This issue has been open for discussion since November 25th, and continues to face premature and hostile closure from those whose interests it doesn't serve.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-270

Lex rightly identified the problem of overuse of "Showstopper". Rob Linden violent agreed with him. Yet he was badgered and bullied in the thread, in some cases by argumentation that said essentially this: "don't make a due process rule because the examples we have now to illustrate that generic principle don't pertain."

I can't think of anything more short-sighted in making a system than that. If there were only 4 Showstoppers, in part it was because people undid then and ratcheted them back.

The curious example of "half of Germany" not being able to log-in was given as a "Showstopper" even though clearly it isn't; a Showstopper must be defined as that which stops the entire Show of Second Life, i.e. the entire grid, not just some portion. 1/16th of the population was affected by something today; another day, 2,000 sims were affected, surely more dramatic, if they were all full, then "half of Germany," as important as it is. This or that interest group, vital though it may be, cannot be allowed to call itself a "Showstopper".

The curious reason this issue was closed, under duress, by the author Lex himself, was because Rob said there was no way to fix it. Why? Because it was a policy not a tool, and the JIRA sucks and helping people make good policy.

It would have been the simplest thing in the world for the Linden in charge to say, "Oh, sounds good, I totally see your point, while we share concern about blocks on "half of Germany," we really need to perserve the overall meaning, so henceforth we will make it a guideline, included in our guidelines, that you must be very sparing on using Showstopper for the good of the project." That would be a "fix" then, even without a "tool".

That the JIRA doesn't allow you even to make a good policy for the JIRA itself is proof positive of its idiotic malfunctioning for the purposes of governance.

The majority of my profits are from avatar design. I have clothing, and armor, and scripted particle effect objects. What exactly would you class as a "normal " merchant?

And "most people keep their World of Warcraft or Eve Online games separate from Second Life"

Just shows what a vacuum you're living in. Try visiting one of the hundreds of roleplay sims around SL. Try looking at the hundreds of avs who wear armor, and carry ornamental and/or functional weapons around on a daily basis. The avatars who walk around with "magic powers", strange fantasy clothing, etc.

"Nothing I've heard from any of you – any of you, including Lindens! – indicates that you want more participation from ordinary people from all walks of life"

Then try reading your own blog sometime. I posted a comment yesterday about a recent windlight meeting, and introducing a score of new faces to jira.

"BTW, here's an excellent example of a perfect legitimate issue very well researched and expressed, that was browbeaten to death by the regulars, by none other than...Lex Neva: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-270 "

Will you please pick your damn side already. Your constant switching is highly irritating.
That issue was a fair and rational debate on a subject, and lex eventually closed it for technical restrictions. Not peer pressure.

"Well, given that Rob says there isn't actually any mechanism in JIRA to do what I want, I'll have to close this issue as "Won't Finish"."

Mechanism. not policy.

And blocking out half of germany is most certainly a showstopper issue. Alienating thousands of people is a problem where all resources need to be concentrated on fixing it. How can you really say denying acess to second life, to 41 MILLION people, is not a showstopper ?

It's not about "my will" or "getting my way" but an issue of due process, and respect of people's proposals, i.e. content and creativity. An author of a proposal should have consent in an issue being closed. If he reopens it after closure, and that's supposed to be the corrective for abuse, then it should not require constant re-closure, especially after a Linden noted that it should be left open for a time for discussion.

However, it has come to my attention that Aimee Weber, joshua nightshade, and Cristiano Midnight are all banned from your blog, Prokofy. So much for free speech there.

Prokofy: Don't forget that we can undo others' actions too. If anyone thinks someone screwed something up, they can just revert the action and explain why they think that was a screwup. LL has decided to trust our collective judgments. Please convince your peers and try to come to consensus, rather than attacking those who disagree and considering them incompetent.

If people were able to re-open issues and not have others tendentiously close with with hostility – as this very proposal and several others of mine have been viciously closed not on the merits but due to personal politics or culture, then there'd be no need to ask for this as a systemic reform. But they do, and its visible here in this JIRA in spades, and its visible in all the other examples I've given – which, BTW, the merits of which have not been responded to by Lindens, or by any resident without baggage. I can go on finding false resolutions and wrongful closures – the heart of the issue is the overuse and indeed misuse even of the word "resolved" and the function "resolved".

There isn't any trust of a collective judgement, Celierra, as if it is some sort of magic phenomenon, when a very few voices in a very determined little cadre with a lot of extraneous baggage and a lot of malice drawn from their class interests are in charge. This is visible. If it weren't evident, I wouldn't have the need to ask for this feature.

If people were able to re-open issues and not have others tendentiously close with with hostility – as this very proposal and several others of mine have been viciously closed not on the merits but due to personal politics or culture, then there'd be no need to ask for this as a systemic reform. But they do, and its visible here in this JIRA in spades, and its visible in all the other examples I've given – which, BTW, the merits of which have not been responded to by Lindens, or by any resident without baggage. I can go on finding false resolutions and wrongful closures – the heart of the issue is the overuse and indeed misuse even of the word "resolved" and the function "resolved".

There isn't any trust of a collective judgement, Celierra, as if it is some sort of magic phenomenon, when a very few voices in a very determined little cadre with a lot of extraneous baggage and a lot of malice drawn from their class interests are in charge. This is visible. If it weren't evident, I wouldn't have the need to ask for this feature.

Um, my so-called "peers" in fact are attacking me, and constantly resorting to attacks, brow-beating, and reference to their disagreements on third-party blogs and forums that are simply not relevant here.

You can't always convince your "peers," Celierra, especially because they aren't really your peers, and will kill off anything you propose merely because they don't like you. It's very hard to get due process to work here as you can see. Due process and the rule of law could triumph over petty personal agendas, but it can only do that if those who institute the JIRA themselves are subject to it – and we've seen that is not the case, by the blanket Linden blank-cheque given to those they already consider "good citizens," regardless of their actual behaviour from JIRA to JIRA and from day to day.

It's what happens when you subject a system to an imagined "collective" and its imagine "judgement" instead of to a democratically established rule of law with liberal values that protect the rule of law itself and minority opinion. Substituting the "collective" for this which you imagine to reach "consensus" is one of the grave fallacies of the JIRA and why it can't work especially on feature discussions.

Just kidding!

But seriously folks. Without volunteers helping to sift through the mass of information in the JIRA it will grind to a halt. Possibly quite literally. It creaks a bit already. Who knows what it'll do with 5,000 open issues that no-one can close!!!

• No one will be able to find which issue to vote on because every issue will have duplicates and no one will know which is the "main" one.
• Searches will become less useful because of the vast number of hits for any given search phrase.
• LL will eventually find the JIRA next to useless as a source of identifying problems or feature requests because of the vast amount of duplicate or "missing information" entries.

The JIRA needs maintenance, day by day, hour by hour. That includes refining and reducing problems in to more manageable and addressable issues. And it just isn't in the plan. Like a wiki, the JIRA is INTENDED to be editable. That's what LL bought, that's what they implemented, that's what we have.

If you want a place to post your own bug reports / feature requests about SL that no one else can edit you'll have to go and start your own blog somewhere or get a thread running in the Forums.

People don't know where the main issue is because the Jira is cumbersome.

Duplicates do need to be merged but as I said above, it's cumbersome.

I appreciate the work people do on merging duplicates, It's extremely helpful but by the same token closing issues is all too easy here. Yes they can be re-opened but I guarantee that a lot of people will be put off when someone without the surname Linden closes their issue.

Your comment about using the forums or third party blogs, whilst well intended, falls into the category of putting people off from using the Jira.

• I didn't mean that the discussion itself (or its size, etc.) was wasteful, but just the fact that it seems to be going nowhere.

• I'll agree that the different definition of "resolved" is causing problems. Here, "resolved" is used as meaning "people think there isn't anything more to be done about this, but it's not consensus". Most people take it as simply "it's done with" - but that is what we mean by "closed". There's been a lot of discussion about this misunderstanding, and I've been trying to get the word "resolved" changed (WEB-247, which is "resolved" but with the meaning of "we're currently helpless on this").

Meanwhile, though, I think that if you keep the intended meaning of "resolved" in mind, you might find that there's a lot less intentional malice or "killing off" out there than you are attributing....

• I think you should know that you're up against some basic properties of an entire system that harnesses a huge community's power in order to deal with huge amounts of data. The idea of these systems has been ingrained into the computer science field and has been shown - repeatedly in projects like Mozilla's Firefox and Wikipedia so forth - to work incredibly well. For example, these principles are things like "anyone has access", "everything is open for inspection", "everything that can be easily undone can be done by anyone", etc.

To be honest, a lot of your argument seems to be a result of culture shock - this sort of freeform trusting collaborative effort isn't really encountered by most people outside of CS (though it's starting to gain traction).

So yes, there is a great amount of support of the status quo, because you're trying to change the foundations of things that have been shown to work. If you want to continue arguing to change this system, you'll probably need to reason out and explain how your proposed change might affect LL's utility, and how to replace the functionality in a way that LL would be willing to implement. From my admittedly-brief scan of this page, I don't think you've thought your change through this much...

Or, you might want to start arguing things within the constraints of this system - for example, if you want to argue that resolving an issue doesn't fall under "easily undone" for those users unfamiliar with JIRA, you might have a point there. Personally, I've been trying to reduce the "culture shock" aspect of it, which is a big problem - see the (many-part) issue WEB-194.

• The Lindens have all the power here - and unfortunately for the "democratic" idea, Linden Lab is a company, operating via hierarchy and a benevolent monarchy (from Philip Linden). Yes, they could always institute something more "democratic" from our POV, but remember who has the power here. We, the residents, are totally cordoned off from their power structure - I'm sure they look at it in terms of "listening to their customers", which is more of a nebulous goal than someone to report to. We're all almost the same in LL's eyes (though certainly with some ranking or weighting).

So, specifically, I don't think we (simple residents) are going to get any LL-imposed power structure at all - from LL's view, there is no direct power in our hands, so any "election" to determine "power" probably seems silly and meaningless. Our interests are very different, so we don't get to decide anything especially important anyway. Their goal is not to simply satisfy residents, but to do the things that are most likely to fall within the intersection of "make money" and "change the world" and "satisfy people" and "help the company" and "please Philip" and on and on and on... and we should not have any illusion of direct power or representation over any aspect of LL.

All we can hope for in terms of "organization", I think, is a sort of volunteer "ombudsman" position, for those people who can translate between Lindenese and Normalese. I think "good citizens" has become the people whom various LL staff consider to be a representative group of good ombudsmans. The big distinction is that, here, LL gets to choose their ombudsmans - residents don't get to choose "representatives". This isn't really an optimal system for residents, but it's not that bad for LL, and we don't control LL. You might try to argue that LL's choices of people to trust stink, but ... to be honest, that most likely will just cause LL to think you're disconnected from their interests.

... I can't really speak for LL, of course, but this is my interpretation on the meta of what's going on here.

...it's getting late for me, so I'm sorry if that last part stopped making sense...

Ordinal Malaprop has an eloquent JIRA to remove the fallacious and misleading of "resolved." It's not that there is a "misunderstanding," it's that there is a deliberately misleading jargonistic spin being put on the word to make it seem as if progress is occurring. It isn't. There isn't any actual "intended meaning," because if there were, a different word could easily be substituted without all the static. And indeed the resistance to having changed this long ago illustrates that there is far more malice than you're willing to admit – or at least deep-seated denial.

I think you should know that it is you who are up against a huge community's power to harness data – it's called "the rest of real life" and "the non-sectarians" and "the non-tekkies of this type". Not even all tekkies are open-source extremists of the type we see in Second Life. It's not as if you represent some powerful force that has some legitimacy merely by its "hugeness". Indeed, that is a grave fallacy, as it makes you act in ways that are damaging to the whole of society.

What you imagine is "ingrained into the science community" is in fact ingrained only to some of it and represents a movement that in fact is criticized severely even within the open-source community itself. There is nothing "scientific" about Wikipedia or demonstratively "better" about Firefox except among its zealous fans. Wikipedia is roundly and rightly criticized in many quarters precisely because it represents anonymous and unaccountable skewing of information by the few under the guise that it is open to the many.

Your notions invoked here like "anyone has access" or "everything is open for inspection" or "everything that can be easily undone can be done by anyone" etc. are first of all falsehoods – propagandistic maneuvers that cover up the truth of the situation: a handful of "expert" cadres gather around each instance of this false "openness" and in fact close it for everyone else, invoking their elite and superior status. They behave in fact worse than the proper editorial board that they purport to overthrow in the name of openness, because they are arbitrary, unaccountable, and often stubbornly ignorant. They represent "the dictatorship of the proletariat". It is anything but the democratic and liberal "openness" that you imply. When "anyone has access," vandals have access, too. Sectarians with harsh extremist agendas have access – and use it. Arbitrary and whimsical notions prevail in the undoing of things. The Big Lie prevails by faking progressing and implying everything is being resolved, and moving along fine.

A lot of the resistance here on the JIRA; the sort of responses a certain set have always engendered on the forums (with Linden backing); and much else around the culture of Second Life are all in fact manifestations of culture shock by these people themselves. I'm not the one with "culture shock"; you are. You are shocked that someone resists what you imagine to be the hegemonic norm. But it isn't; it's a sect, and will go on being treated as one, more and more, until ultimately the project fails if it cannot adapt to real liberal democracy and cannot drop its totalitarian methods.

Because there isn't any "new culture" here. The idea that "anyone can undo" and "anyone has access" is in fact straight out of the playbook of propagandistic Bolshevism: ostensibly open up a process to everyone, give away all property, make people's councils, etc. etc. – and in fact have a small cadre of people really run it.

Freeform trusting collaboration can work when there is a narrowly-defined task and a group of like-minded people. Even there, many doubts can be placed as to its efficacy. Possibly a task like "let's manufacture a new car" or "let's repair the broken servers" lend themselves to this collectivization and democratic centralism you call "collaboration".

But other more complex tasks like "let's have a government" or "let's have a system for democratic participation of a user population in the product being created for their use" are not suited to this collectivization or fake "collaboration" – especially when in fact they don't own the property being changed. It's just that simple.

It is you who are trying to change the foundations of the status quo established over the millenia by numerous human communities in every era. And the ideology for your change has already been "done" in the last century, with tragic consequences. You cannot fake collaboration when it does not exist. You cannot collectivize everyone. There must be protection of minorities, freedom of expression, and a willingness to accept new data and feedback to peacefully change this "collective will" that in fact ends up being imposed from on high by violence when it cannot gain consent.

Linden Lab is trying to elevate to cult status open-source culture that in fact itself is under fire even within the open-source community. Various artifacts of their regime – the Love Machine, the Tao, the JIRA, the SL Views – are all out of the playbook of past utopianist ideologies that are failed. While they may appear as grand experiments on the bleeding edge, in real life, the execution of these ideologies in any kind of massive real way only led to people bleeding, not edges.

I've thought through my proposal abundantly because I was an apt student of the previous Feature Voting Tool in the two years before it was summarily killed off by one resident, Angel Fluffy, with the applause of a few busy Lindens. I followed how the chimera of an improved FVT was waved before an indifferent public and how in fact it was killed by stealth by not being "migrated" but by being "deleted". It really is an appalling thing when a world created under the banner of "your world, your imagination," can, in the dark of the night, be deleted – losing thousands of proposals hammered out by residents – their content – that in fact accrued hundreds of votes – their content. Lindens tend to think narrowly of "content" as only what skilled programmers make in code or on PSP. But content is democratic participation, too.

The culture shock, again, needs to be reduced on the side of the tekkie wikinistas. They need to stop slamming their outmoded, outdated sectarian culture down the throats of normal people outside their magic circle who have absolutely no reason to drop the normal, democratic, participatory procedures of real life for this insanity. They'll need to adjust, and stop screaming in a sectarian manner for things like removal of the right to vote "no," or removal of the right of a person to express consent, or removal of content arbitrarily and whimsically. There is nothing sacrosanct about their approaches; there is nothing new. Indeed, they are a very old story.

The idea that "Linden Lab is a company" or "Linden Lab is a benevolent monarchy" simply can't wash any more in the era of open-source. Are you imagine these two facts of hegemony and authoritarianism are to ever and anon pertain in the open-source setting? Are you imagining that some cadres will decide everything, even so? Are you to imagine that a set of "avant-garde workers" will get to set everything about this software in stone before it is open-sourced so as to keep control over the world forever? Why? And how?

No, the Lindens – and you – have to remember who else has the power here: the people who pay tier, whether on a 512 m2 or 512 islands – the people who pay 80 percent of the Lindens' bottom line. That is a significant venture capitalist vote, my dear. It matters. And even if they unceremoniously dump these people in favour of a new hook-up fee with their special friends who can make open Sims, they will still have to have some kind of consent of the governed or people will flock to Multiverse or Metaplace or whatever.

It's not just that we have the "vote with our feet". The Lindens in fact instituted the FVT and then later the JIRA precisely because in their hippie fastness, they do have at least some nominal concession to the idea of democratic participation. I think the illusion that you and others so willing to ascribe power to the Lindens in excessive of the actuality (and hence ascribe it to their fanboyz gathering around them so zealously) is that this is a situation in nature that can last. It can't. You cannot control the many by the few without their consent for long.

Ombudsmen are something I know about. It's no accident that you find very few people with this title in the United States, except in very localized and narrow settings, i.e. "the state ombudsman for education". That's because the U.S. has a common-law system with a very important feature: adversarial defense. By contrast other systems have a civil-law system with magisterial power against which adversarial defense is weak, or non-existent.

Ombudsmen tend to be prescribed, for example, by Western Europeans with established democracies and more homogenous cultures, for example, for Central Asians, as a way of getting around the problem of their failure to reform their Soviet-style unjust "justice systems".

Ombudsmen can work when they have a narrow set of tasks, the support of parliament, transparency and accountability, and real influence – if not the power of intervention – over the executive and judicial branches.

The ombudsmen here in SL are appointed by the executive branch, the Lindens, and do not have widespread popular support (it's like the problem of the resmods on the forums). They don't translate between Lindenese and Normalese. They are a conveyor belt for power who are abject loyalists basically like-minded to what they perceive as the Linden project (and often we find them more zealous than their masters, yet their masters seem powerless to curb them).

Ultimately, at root, the P-JIRA is a sop. It's a rubber-stamp parliament. The real decisions are made on Battery Street, not here. While that is a fact of life for many valid reasons, there isn't any good reason to cover up this fact with the prettification of claiming "good citizenry" and "your world, your imagination" when they don't truly exist.

Alyx, your summary of the discussion is typical of what happens in the hall of mirrors of Second Life forums.

I've never used the word "conspiracy" – you have. I am not attacking people right and left; you imagine that merely because I oppose their will and don't go along with the "collective will" here which in fact isn't as representative as you imagine.

Here's what I wrote: "frequent practice by a tiny group of coders who spend a great deal of time on the JIRA is to unilaterally and arbitrarily close any issue they do not agree with, or move issues that they perceive as needing to be conflated with other issues."

This is enough of a problem that two other people I never heard of launched this exact same sort of JIRA in the last few months, and it led to a significant reform: e-mail notifications of what was happening on your JIRA began to go out, so you could rush back on here and defend your proposal. A Linden even intervened with a Linden policy, when Workingonit said basically, "if you have concerns about arbitrary closure, report them and we'll take a look." That can't scale. So my proposal is to institutionalize a feature that would automatically trigger the need for a consent toggle on closures within a time period (or some alternative, Linden review after multiple opening and closing).

Alyx, I'm pointing out here a basic problem of due process – that arbitrary closure is a frequently-enough occurring problem that there should be some rule about it. It's not, as you imagine, a ferreting out of a conspiracy – some conspiracy if anyone can see it and protest it! It's not "attacking people" – who themselves have been far more ferocious and even vicious in attacking me merely because I countered their will.

Once again, you're trying to invoke the false flag of "the altruism of these good citizens" as if requiring consent to the work of good citizens somehow undermines their good. Let them bustle about and make motions to close, change, move. All to the good. Their work then is done. It then awaits consent Fluf because it's not about "good work" but about the good thing of consent, too – the other half of the equation without which no governance system can succeed. It's no good having that hapless closure target re-open – a tug of war might ensue. Instead, a curb on the zeal of the closers, and a form of due process has to be introduced, whereby consent is always what they must face in trying to develop their logic. It forces them to make their case better – because often, their case is "because I feel like it" or "because I don't think the Lindens will do it".

It becomes a routine matter – likely a very large percentage of the people alerted to a closure motion will see the logic of the action and toggle it YES immediately. A small percentage will toggle NO because they are not persuaded that the action was justified. And another percentage – larger than this latter, but still relatively small – will disappear, as they won't bother to follow up on their light-headed proposal and will time out and delete. Why does this challenge you so? Make good arguments, no one will toggle NO against you, right?

Your notion that there would actually be 5,000 closed items suggests you are unconsciously speaking to a very deep problem here: you unwittingly to yourself believe that many, many people will object to their closures, and that the only thing standing between them and expression this will is fear or lack of knowledge. And that's quite a statement. Sit with that and contemplate what you are about here, implying that.

There are far, far less open items, but not because they were efficiently closed; they are not open because the people closed gave up, didn't understand, or were falsely told of "resolutions". That is unscientific.

You're also falsely invoking a storm of duplications as the result of this proposal, as if the only way to remove duplication is to hack and slash at everybody who couldn't find their way around this ridiculously complex labyrinth. But...you can notify people of duplications by...posting the link! Duh! Then everyone can see it. The logic will either be abundantly clear – or not. Someone getting such an email will instantly be persuaded, no? Because the good citizens do good, right? So...only in a small percentage of cases due to a) human error (can you admit that takes place?) b) lack of understanding of the full motivation for the proposal; c) insufficient attention to the broader case to be made; d) bias (gasp, can you admit that does take place even among good citizens?!) will obtain.

If the JIRA is intended to be editable, Fluf, hey, let's edit it: let's have people whose proposals or bugs are closed have the right to edit, too, and not be closed with prejudice, having to face a tide of hateful collectivists who resent them speaking up. Let their individual right be respected to edit, too. Let them edit. Let them edit by saying "no, I prefer not to," and let them explain themselves, prevail, lose, or time out. Why are you afraid of editing, Fluf? This is an open system, right?

There's no "have to start your own blog" that has to be built into an open system, eh? I mean, if it is so open and editable, hey, let's edit the thing and not force minority opinion out the door to a far-away blog, when they may contain the key to knowledge.

Look, let's try to remember what our goal here is – if we can invoke any "our" in any abstract way about this collection of self-interests. Let's remember that our goal is to help the Lindens make better software during their tenure as temporary trustees of the engine of the Metaverse. (I realize there may be about 6 false premises in that statement but let's posit it for the sake of argument for now.) If that is not the goal, then arbitrary and overzealous readings of their intentions which may disappear down a dark alley of misguided denial will lead them to make bad software.

Dear Prokofy Neva,

Re: Your post of the 02/Dec/07 01:47 PM

I commonly associate the use of lengthy commentary to confuse and confound the argument of an issue (as in "Filibuster"). I associate clear concise communication as a platform for further discussion based on a clear understanding of the facts between parties.

I defend my invoking of 'the false flag of "the altruism of these good citizens"', even though I didn't actually invoke it. It does take good natured "users" to help keep the JIRA manageable and in shape. (The word citizen would be more appropriate in a political debate ... erm ... I'm not having a political debate am I?).

It is good to have the closed target re-open, if it's still an issue that is not addressed more fully elsewhere, or if it was closed for a misunderstanding for example. So the good work of the "user" is checked by other "users".

I wasn't aware the JIRA is a system of governance in itself. In fact I'll be bold and say it isn't. 'Governance has been defined as "rules, processes and behaviour that affect the way in which powers are exercised.... particularly as regards openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness and coherence"' So no. The JIRA is a contributory information source to LL's own system of Governance if you want to call it that. You may of course prefer to think of it as a minority governance within a larger context in which it is also a minority governance or something. Uhm. Hang on. Aren't we drifting off topic here?

You obviously feel that "a form of due process has to be introduced" to control the closing of issues... (are we having a legal debate now?) ... and you're entitled to that viewpoint. Many others however feel differently. Yay! back on topic!

You then describe some kind of democratic voting process to validate the closing of issues. Again, I respect your right to feel that's a good idea. However, that's not currently part of the JIRA and not (afaik) an easily bolted on feature. You also brush across the fact that people watching an issue are instantly alerted to it's closure at the moment anyway. So in effect the democratic peer review already occurs doesn't it?

I actually said there would be 5,000 open issues, not closed. And since I can't actually decode the rest of the paragraph to tell if you meant open or closed ... I'll sit and contemplate ... something ... Oh ... while we're here, can I suggest your need to have these obscure rambling paragraphs, often with only one full stop, suggests that you are unconsciously doing something too, and could you sit and contemplate it please? [I feel better now we've traded bizarre psychological assessments of each other].
Oh no hang on. I contemplated just enough! I recall something about: issues should be closed only with the consent of the original reporter. In which case, I was simply suggesting that process would significantly slow down closing issues by the need for exchange of request, consent, then action of closing an item.
Right. Ok. I've thought about all that fear and lack of knowledge stuff. Nope. Doesn't apply. Sorry.

Hey cool. Thanks for this one... Then you state that there are far far less open items and it's because people gave up or didn't understand. You then call that unscientific.
Well. OK. To take a scientific perspective. How do you know that to be true? What stats do you have that would help validate that claim? What method of finding that out could you use, that I could then re-use to validate your findings?

Duplications. you want me to email someone a suggested link in the hope they might read it and respond someday that "yes" or "no" that sounds like a good idea? So then I can go ahead and link it? Time Prokofy! Time is your enemy here, not some bias on which issues should be linked as a duplicate! Besides, by the very act of linking you get a big "Comment" box to explain your link to the reporter and other readers. That's your email right there. The possibility they will come back and say "no hang on" and re-open it is them saying "no" to the email you wanted to send earlier. What are you adding except delay?

People who's proposals or bugs are closed DO have the right to edit. I said "Like a wiki, the JIRA is INTENDED to be editable". How clear cut can I get? I even went out on a limb and used caps! Why are you afraid of users oh sorry .. "citizens" editing your issues? I'm not!

My parting remarks on going to start your own blog were in the hope that an intelligent user might think "we'll that's not going to work as a way of getting things noticed." Or in some cases, current blog maintainers might be better off airing certain grievances back on their own blog. I sometimes make such crass remarks at the ends of posts and must stop it. I forget irony doesn't work well on the web sometimes.

Then you come up with this one : "Look, let's try to remember what our goal here is – if we can invoke any "our" in any abstract way about this collection of self-interests. Let's remember that our goal is to help the Lindens make better software during their tenure as temporary trustees of the engine of the Metaverse. (I realize there may be about 6 false premises in that statement but let's posit it for the sake of argument for now.) If that is not the goal, then arbitrary and overzealous readings of their intentions which may disappear down a dark alley of misguided denial will lead them to make bad software. "

Well no. Lets not "posit" it shall we? It's fundamentally flawed in so many ways! Take it back to basics and start again shall we? The original description:

"A frequent practice by a tiny group of coders who spend a great deal of time on the JIRA is to unilaterally and arbitrarily close any issue they do not agree with, or move issues that they perceive as needing to be conflated with other issues.

The JIRA should be set up with a mechanism so that no issue can be closed or moved without the author's consent."

1 - You believe it to be "A frequent practice" many others do not.
2 - I strongly doubt that the LL coders themselves spend much time on here at all. They should be looking at the LL internal JIRA instead. You may be referring to active contributors, which are citizens or users to you or me.
3 - Not many Linden's spend enough time in here (in my opinion). Not through any particular fault. Perhaps simply because it's a bigger more sprawling thing than perhaps they expected, perhaps because they are too busy dealing with the problems they have already.
4 - It's only unilateral until the reporter or someone else decides it needs re-opening or moving back. So it's not technically unilateral at all since both sides can comment.
5 - I'm stunned to think these actions might be "at random" (arbitrarily) carried out. Who in their right mind logs in to the JIRA for a fun filled hour of closing random items??? Besides, your use of this word undermines all your further mentions of bias in following comments.
6 - I do not believe your basic notion of not being able to close issues without the reporters consent is practical or required.

Yours Sincerely,

Fluf.

I'm not the one who made up the term "good citizens". Rob Linden did. I wouldn't call them good, or citizens. They are dispassionately speaking, one set of customers, or let's say "prosumers," being played off against another set of prosumers, by the company – or, if you will, in an emulation of a world, two political parties that are debating, but in a closed society where the polls are rigged.

When you speak of 5,000 issues, closed or open, being at issue, the whole point is that you imagine that under my system, there would be 5,000 issues open because you imagine that those 5,000 people would rebel against the closure. Their rebellion would be somehow visible or even incited by my system. So I'm pointing out that you believe that 5,000 closed incidents today would mainly be opened again by rebellious citizens feeling wronged and falsely closed.

So my point is that couldn't happen, if the rationality and logic and science you claim prefails on the JIRA in fact obtains.

This page is getting very slow to load because of long comments, and not only by me. Many of your concerns are already addressed. I'll reiterate the argumentations on my blog here:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2007/12/the-two-culture.html

Prokofy

Zigzag, there is absolutely no necessary correlation between the number of people who watch an issue, and the number voting, and to imply that is to create undue pressure for closure around an issue. Some people are intimidated enough not to vote because they don't want to face the very ferocious group peer pressure here to close issues. Whether or not the watchers favour the issue is irrelevant; they are merely watching.

I would reject any notion of a "counter issue" as this JIRA itself is a counter issue to the significant number of premature and unjustified closures taking place, and frankly, no "poll" is going to ever be accepted as accurate and reflecting any kind of "democratic will of the majority"; it will merely be an indicator for the tiny core of closures to flash mob it, a chronic problem with all wikis.

Seg, this isn't a bug, it's a new feature. As such it, needs to be left alone for the original proposer to refine it, seek votes in favour of it, and not face the heavy pressure of the tiny minority of users and readers who agitate to close things they don't like. Just leave it alone.

• Silly feature requests. "Add gold farming so noobs can have a job".

"Silly" is too subjective. Even though there are obviously silly requests, there's too much of a grey area. I'm also wary of the 'detrimental' category, for the same reason. There's been a number of features that have been dropped, nerfed, or limited that don't need to be, and there's been excessive restrictions on new features (for example, the new camera controls).

Prok: Do you have evidence that people are being harassed to remove votes or that there's any other pressure that would make people afraid to vote for an issue?

A stop gap solution is to have people who are interested be notified when the issue changes and to allow anyone to reopen the issue; which we already have with the "Watch It" and "Reopen Issue" features.

The underlying issue is not a technical problem but a social problem. The actions of some users upset other users. The proposed technical solution does not fully address the underlying issue or the issues that will result from it's implementation.

Believe it or not, sometimes the original authors are wrong and no amount of discussion will convince them otherwise. Being required to get their agreement isn't only time consuming but in some cases impossible. This sort of rule would be easy to exploit, it gives all the power to the author and none to the community. The author can say anything then veto naysayers changes. If the author becomes unavailable then all changes are pocket vetoed; it holds the community hostage and keeps things from moving forwards. This proposed rule doesn't encourage community cooperation, it discourages it by partitioning the public intellectual space.

I'm going to Resolve(Won't Finish) this because, it is burdensome, exploitable, anti-community and there is a stop-gap solution.

By no means is this to say the underlying issue does not exist or it should be ignored but this feature suggestion is dead. The underlying issue should be submitted as a bug report so that more then one proposal can be examined and discussed. It is too early in this debate to be backing only one horse.

No, Strife, you cannot come here and close and resolve an issue "just because" you feel you are "in charge" here. The Lindens may have appointed you as forums resmod; you may enjoy some appointed role here. But you do not represent me or my interests or the interests of many people like me who find the JIRA does not represent their will, their wishes, or their ideas. A number of people have repeatedly expressed distress that issues that they post here are closed arbitrarily and prematurely. The JIRA pages are riddled with false resolutions and closures made with dissent or reluctance or intimidation. My proposal, JIRA WEB-382 speaks to that chronic problem by having a simple toggle, much like the notification to anyone that action is taken of any sort on their JIRA – an automatic, simple notification that says that a JIRA has been closed/resolved, and they must consent to it within 30 days. If they do not consent, it remains open.

The argumentations about "clutter" or "irrationality" or "being out of step with 'the community'" have all been amply addressed. Multiple examples have been given of this problem, and the point has been amply and repeatedly made that just because issues remain open doesn't mean that they are somehow "cluttering" a device that has infinite capacity to add any number of proposals and deal with the in a diverse set of ways, with many filters to allow focus on any aspect that needs work, without fear that some "unfinished" section has to press on the mind.

"Reopen Issue" feature is merely a stop-gap, and not sufficient, because it means that a person has to fly in the face of "community" heavy-weights or even Lindens who close an issue – and re-open it, inciting hatred from that group, and invective that they are "anti-community," as you've done with me (when in fact you mean "critical of this small group calling itself the community".

The social issue of non-consent is a very real one on a mechanism that is supposed to "do" for governance, such as it is. A simple toggle goes a long way to helping people feel real ownership and participation in this device.

Re: you claim that "original authors are wrong". Original authors are not always wrong, and even if they are sometimes wrong, that would never be a reason not to obtain consent for closing a bug prioritization or a feature proposal. It truly is a specious argument, because the concept of "what is wrong" is a very subjective one, and it's extremely important, in a project that calls itself open-ended, like Second Life, not to close off thought, criticism, and rational questioning of "what is right and wrong". You are not the arbiter of what is wrong or right, Strife.

There isn't any "time consumption" involved in the consent issue, any more than there is in the issue of notification. When a "close" motion is made on a JIRA entry, the author is notified and has 30 days to respond. If he doesn't respond, it defaults to the closure/resolved action. If he refuses to give consent, he provides his reasons and the votes stay open and keep counting. That way no one can arbitrarily cut off discussion or voting "just because" they feel it has "been there too long". No time is required on any person's part to persuade someone to "go along with the community". If he doesn't find the arguments persuasive, too bad. Obviously, he has his own compelling arguments, his own examples and understandings, and let them stand in an open project supposedly devoted to finding truth and keeping open all the options.

The "community" simply doesn't exist; it's a fiction. It's a handful of people who feel they are "in charge. They don't represent a wider group of people participating in the JIRA or even larger group watching it – or still larger group not knowing of its existence. Right now, this small group has all the powers (especially as the Lindens are usually too busy to follow it, and have their own internal JIRA). It's a very good corrective and check and balance on the power of this group of "regulars" and "good citizens" (as Rob Linden called them) that consent must be obtained.

Why would the refusal of someone to stand down from a proposal for a feature he deems worth prove such a threat to your order, Strife? Isn't that awfully troubling, that you can imagine there is SUCH dissent on the JIRA that if my proposal were implemented, you could face massive numbers of people refusing to have their JIRAs closed?! Is the JIRA so based on irrational force and tribalism that it can't brook what will likely amount to a small percentage of dissent?! I would anticipate, reasonably, that most people would consent, and only a small percentage would not. Granting of consent would help the sense that governance is done with the public's willingness, and not over their heads.

After all, these "good citizens" are ostensibly properly closing JIRAs, making good arguments, and the people who have proposed the JIRAs closed will surely see the logic of their arguments, right? So what on earth do you have to be afraid of, Strife?

I've explained over and over and OVER again that my proposal HAS A TIME LIMIT. 30 days might be reasonable. So for you to go on about "pocket vetoes" and all the rest is just plain tendentious. The notion that "the community" is held hostage merely because somebody rejects the "wisdom" of what is no crowd, but a cabal, is really suspect, Strife. Huh?

The public intellectual space is hardly "partitioned" (shudder) because somebody wants to stand by a proposal they make that they feel is a good one, and rejects a precipitous closure of their issue. Do you honestly think that debate in a normal, democratic society, with a yes or no, with this candidate or that candidate, constitutes a "partitioning" of public intellectual space? What kind of wild notion is that? The real "partitioning" here, Strife, is the small group of people who keep speaking on behalf of "the community," and taking actions that do not in fact have its support.

The idea that this proposal is "anti-community" is just the rhetoric of the cabal. It's totally wrong-headed. If people can be sure that when they make a proposal, it won't be slammed shut by a small group arrogating themselves to power, or by people who, even acting in good faith, just feel they are "doing good," in fact it will build up a sense of assurance of free and cooperative participation for people that in fact is essential to any real community – not this fake one constantly taking the name "the community" in fact to represent a tiny group of elitist coders.

You don't get to decide something "times out" or is dead. It's very much alive. This problem persists. People go on being browbeaten and intimidated. People even with really great ideas, strong coders, are bullied. This just isn't a good system! As for "bug" submission about examining two proposals at once on one topic, that is what seems time-consuming, burdensome, awkward, and difficult – and would in fact be solved by a simple ability to vote "no".

Knock it off, Strife. Second Life does not belong to you and this small group of elitist coders. It is a larger world than you have any imagination of. Leave it alone; let it grow; let it be free. Don't be so threatened, and have such brittle power, that someone's mere refusal, their mere support for their own idea, becomes such a monster that it "destroys the community".

What kind of community could it possibly be, if someone insisting on consent, asks to have their freedom, too?

Argent, this question has already been addressed. I was challenged to find examples: I did. People word-fisked them and comment-saladed them – they stand. Of course there is pressure. Just look at this very thread if you somehow have need to find "proof" and "evidence".

Seriously. Open your mind. Go to the list of closed issues. Review them. You will be amazed. I know I was. I had no idea it was as bad as it turned out to be.

Number of contributers apart from Prokofy: 25

Contributers/word counts (in ascending order of word count):

Fatz Scheflo - 5
Seg Baphomet - 6
Soft Linden - 7
Lee Ponzu - 13
Alexa Linden - 16
Melissa Yeuxdoux - 34
Vincent Nacon - 42
Schwartz Gustafson - 43
ZigZag Freenote - 68
Beezle Warburton - 102
nika talaj - 112
Argent Stonecutter - 124
Jacek Antonelli - 141
Rob Linden - 181
Untameable Wildcat - 223 NOT including this post
Alyx Sands - 232
Barney Boomslang - 259
Strife Onizuka - 268
Ciaran Laval - 307
Mercia McMahon - 794
Lex Neva - 832
Celierra Darling - 921
Thraxis Epsilon - 931
Fluf Fredriksson 1,519
WarKirby Magojiro -2,858

Total number of words posted that don't belong to Prokofy Neva: 10,038

Prokofy Neva word count: 16,530

Over one third more than all the other contributers put together, and over five times more than the next most prolific contributor.

Interestingly, after 10,646 words, Prokofy states: "I'm not going to get into further rhetorical battles here" - and then she goes on to write a further 5,874 words doing just that. No axe to grind? You decide.

During all those words, Prokofy declares nearly everyone wrong except for a few who she ignores entirely. Even three Lindens are wrong, because the pattern here is simple - Prokofy is right, whoever disagrees with her is wrong.

Rob Linden, apparently, is not only "wrong" but "biased" and promoting "unlawful behavior". To accuse someone of being involved in unlawful behavior is running mighty close to libellous, in my opinion.

In short, for those watching and those who could be bothered to read this far through the pages and pages of Prokofy rant, this entire issue is based around one thing.

Trolling.

The original issue isn't going to be resolved. JIRA isn't meant to work this way, and Prok knows this. By raising this issue specifically, she has managed to create a ranting board that she can use to shove her opinions in other peoples faces at a ratio of over 5:1 to what others have to say, making her quite an extraordinary troll. Whenever anyone closes this issue, she's there very quickly to both re-open it and rant some more about how everyone else is wrong (and, incidentally, picks on her) and she's right.

If a Linden disagrees, they're a member of her "feted inner core" of "tekkie-wikis" that are the apparent mysterious illuminati behind Second Life's running. If a non-Linden disagrees, they're simply wrong.

My suggestion for this entire issue is to put it on a 90 day countdown, and then not feed the troll. After 90 days, when it's had a chance to die because nobody will vote for it, close it as "never going to be fixed" because let's face it - it WON'T be fixed, because it ISN'T a bug, it's a method for someone to continue to "win a victory" by having her issue open all the time and having a way to rant now that she's been banned from the forums and the blog.

And my prediction for 2008? Prok will complete her hat trick and get banned from the JIRA as well. For trolling.

Goodnight, and good luck.

1. There is no word count on the JIRA. If there needed to be, as a supposed "mere utilitarian form" it could force you to keep to 500 words or something by running out of space. But it doesn't. Especially on feature proposals, sometimes very long and complex ideas have to be articulated, and fortunately, those who set up the JIRA didn't put word limits on it, and kill creativity and openness.

2. I don't feel it is worth continuing to post when people keep reiterating the same arguments against the idea, which amount to tribal utterances, like "You don't fit," or "We don't like you," or "We're from a group in SL that harasses and griefs you already and we're going to do it here, too" or "Your proposal has been open too long" or "Your idea can't work". These aren't serious.

What one does have to do, however, is argue against closures with long argumentation like Strife's. And so I did. It can take a very long piece to argue against each refutation point by point.

3. JIRA can indeed work this way. Already, a little battle was waged to have notifications go out, so that when these busy-bodies started closing and resolving right and left, people could race to the scene to defend themselves. This idea merely strengthens that concept. And...if you don't like it, you can move on to others you do like. Filter, focus, forget.

4. It is not "being a troll" to make an idea that helps strengthen participatory democracy, and defend it against tribalists who keep knocking it merely because "one of our own" didn't make it or "you don't belong here".

5. There is no reason to ban me from the JIRA, merely from defending my ideas, and resisting the closure of proposals – a problem I address (and suffer) in this very proposal itself.

6. Lindens can be wrong, too. Are they somehow beyond criticism?! If they plan to open source this software, do they imagine only they can make decisions about it for ever?! Indeed, it does promote wrongful behaviour to reward the role of "good citizens" to people who bustle around and essentially close proposals simply because their own circle and their own minds are closed. They aren't elected by the people. The JIRA doesn't have the legitimacy it could have if people's consent went into the closure of their proposals – and if they could simply vote "no".

7. It's typical of people in an elitist, close-ranked, close-minded group to imagine that others are "ranting" or "are trolls" or "are wrong, 5:1". Huh? In a setting where the faithful can close their ranks and summon all their warriors and mob the JIRA, and where someone with a proposal disliked by this group can't even count on the population even knowing about the JIRA, it's very rigged.

In short, false science (statistics, including word counts from members of groups that already grief me inworld and Second Citizen regulars): tribal reasoning (you don't fit, you didn't get votes, we don't like you); false invocation of authority ("you criticized a Linden"), etc. – this has been characteristic throughout this whole thread.

The good reasoning against it – made in good faith – such as "too much administrative work" or "would jam up the system" has been met with an extremely cogent counter-reasoning on my part:

"What kind of system is the JIRA if you anticipate so much dissent from closures that you'd face numerous people refusing to listen to reasons to close their proposals?! Not one that is reasonable, rational, open-ended and democratic! Not wisdom of the crowd, but mob justice!"

@Prokofy: There IS much petty trolling among what you write- the "evil" Strife who is only bribed by LL anyway, the general elite techie clique squad (or whatever multi-morpheme compound you want to use), and oh, the "rest" of us just are what? The mob? Sheep? Warriors??? I don't get it. You might also want to get your imagery right. I highly resent being chucked into the same pot as references to Algerian jihadists, thank you very much.

And by reopening this issue again and again you show what exactly? Maturity? The will to fight for a worthy cause?
Or maybe just petty grudges again. stamps foot

There isn't any "petty trolling," which is merely a label you put on people as officious and offensive as any you accuse me of putting. I haven't said Strife is "evil"; I've merely pointed out that just because he is appointed by the Lindens as resmod doesn't mean he can "resmod me away" here.

There is an elitist club of coders here. Anyone can see it. Those who have the skills to code AND feel a sense of superiority to others in being able to "manage" have settled in and busily set about closing things they don't like.

We need some set of checks and balances against this power. Being able to vote "no" is one (but even the Atlassian "Atlas Shrugs" coders have said they "can't" put in a "no vote" function "just because".

Um, nobody has been called an Algerian jihadist. What I've pointed out is an analogy to a situation in real life, where people claim that ending a vote is somehow "a no vote". It's not. It's ending a vote. A closure action stops the vote. A person may not get to open it for days. That's wrong.

I reopen this issue not to be petulant or petty or stamp my foot, but because my idea is a good one, a simple one, and one that adds a great deal of credibility to a very highly flawed and manipulable device.

Indeed, the reason that this group can fly at it with such fury is precisely because they see it as a check and balance against their overwhelming power. But sorry, that needs to happen.

Once again, I will ask the question:

What kind of tyrannical system is the JIRA, if it can't accept that occasional some small number of people will not wish to close their proposals?! And wish to have consent?

Obviously, if they keep re-opening them, they will merely be accused of petty grudges and stamping their feet. See what I mean? So what are they to do with the petty-minded who keep closing them for political reasons, saying "you are anti-community," or "your proposal isn't possible to do" or "we don't like you" or "the Lindens don't like this". Those are hardly rational and cogent reasons.

ability to mark as needs more information because possibly misfiled/won't fix, if author doesn't respond to the marking within some time period, its auto set to that status. If author responds then obviously can be worked out from there.... or even better auto add's it to be triaged w/linden's of corresponding team/group/studio?

just 2 cent's, don't take it for more than its worth

Your original ticket was:

"The JIRA should be set up with a mechanism so that no issue can be closed or moved without the author's consent."

Which you raised as either a bug, or a new desired feature.

Well, I went to http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/ the makers of JIRA, and downloaded the evaluation version, set it up and had a play.

There are a number of ways it can be configured, and among them is the ability for users to be able to open or create tickets and to close THEIR OWN tickets, but only comment on other tickets. At it's ultimate setting, users can only open a ticket, and administrators have to move/close it.

Therefore, this is NOT a technical issue, since JIRA is already capable of doing these things. It is not a bug, because it works, and it's not a new feature request because the feature already exists.

What it IS, and you know this as well as I do, is a POLICY DECISION on the part of the people who have set this instance of JIRA up, Linden Labs, who have decided to adopt as a policy the allowance that people don't have to be administrators to move, close or resolve bugs. Policy decisions should be discussed in a forum, not on the JIRA because the purpose of the JIRA is to highlight existing bugs or desired new features, neither of which applies to the decision of Linden Labs to configure JIRA in the way they have configured it.

I am therefore closing this ticket as fixed, because it does not highlight a bug or a new desired feature, which is the purpose of the Second Life JIRA. If you re-open it purely because you still disagree with the fact that it's a Linden policy decision to allow this, rather than a bug in the software, then it shows that you are what I've accused you of being - A troll.

The decision to prove me right or wrong rests with you. But this is not an issue that should even be being discussed on the JIRA, and, as is the current policy (and I quote) "an issue can also be resolved or closed if it appears to be a duplicate of another issue, unreproducible, misfiled, NOT A BUG, incomplete, etc."

It's absolutely immaterial to me whether this is a "bug" or a "feature" but it seems clear it is a feature request for the working of the entire JIRA, there is no existing feature, and it is perfectly legitimate.

If the Atlassian software can in fact be configured so that users alone can open, create and CLOSE tickets, but only COMMENT on other tickets, great! That means it is technically possible; that means that even the tekkies at Altassian, who are adamantly opposed to the idea of a "no" vote with their tekkie ideology, can still conceive of a more legitimate and democratic system built on CONSENT, that does not enable other residents to close your proposal.

That only strengthens the validity of my proposal! And it's only an argument IN FAVOUR of my proposal. Thanks!

BUT the Lindens did not configure it this way! They could, but they didn't. It doesn't exist. Since they control the configuration and make these decisions, we still have to prevail on them to make this configuration, which is indeed a worthy one!

It's completely specious, argumentative, and mere fisking to say that "a feature already exists because it is in the generic software therefore you can't propose it as it theoretically exists" when it does not exist in practice as the Lindens configured it. Duh. That's all pretty obvious, and I'm afraid that dog won't hunt.

My feature is a call on the Lindens to use what turns out to be an already-existing capacity of this software to toggle it so that users can create and close their own proposals, but only comment on others. I wouldn't advocate that particular configuration to the letter, however, because I know what the Lindens' argumentation will be: "But we're too busy...but there are too many proposals...but we can't keep track...but we need to empower the residents with tools [groan]...but we need the good citizens to do the scut work." OK, but then put a toggle and a time limit on it so that people's content isn't destroyed.

AND we really do in fact need an explanation here for why a perfectly functional aspect of this software, that in fact made it more democratic, was suppressed, and in its place, a small group of coders were put in power with discretionary capacity. Why?

Hey, Lindens, where's your logic that you apply on ad farms, that all content is sacrosanct, and no one can remove it. Why is that the entire Feature Voter system could be destroyed and here, any of our content destroyed on a whim?!

I reject any and all efforts to characterize as "trolling" a perfectly legitimate and valid – and necessary – idea for the JIRA to make it have democratic participation with CONSENT.

I happen to think that your idea regarding 30 days (which, incidentally, IS another setting that can be assigned by JIRA administration) could do with being debated, possibly even implemented - but it's something that should be raised as a ticket in itself.

The original issue you have raised here is not going to be changed. Redescribing the issue helps, but doesn't make it easy for people who would potentially vote for it to find the ticket, which is why it would be better for you to close this issue and open a new one with a description highlighting your idea regarding the 30 days.

I'm not doing this purely to wind you up or to spite you, much as you're already claiming the opposite. But your original idea isn't going to be adopted - that much is plain by now. You do yourself no service by sticking to this ticket and denying others who might agree with a 30 day proposal the chance to see that is what is now the topic of discussion.

it is not the place of anyone outside of LL to decide what will be and what will not be.
entering suggestions for changes to the jira are allowed in the jira.
anyone not an employee of LL that attempts to force their personal demands and opinions by closing jiras and/or changing the priority outside of the guidelines for priorities in the public jira need to be banned from secondlife forever.
this is not your personal power sandbox.

keep it objective, fair, and just.
just because it sounds like your false position of power may feel threatened doesn't give you any more rights than anyone else not an employee of LL.

As a matter of fact I do not think anyone not an employee of LL should have any authority to alter anything on the jira.
if LL has not the resources to maintain this tool for what it is designed for then they need to shut it down.

jira is a tool for logging defects and features for all of LL's offerings. And this jira is one of those product offerings.

That's actually the sort of change to this ticket I was suggesting that Prok did. Well done, Strife, for making these changes. This is a resolution I can - and do - support.

And it isn't "casting aspersions" and being "not-serious" to tell the truth about what is happening here.

And what is happening here is that a small group of coders who imagine they know better are closing other people's issues merely because they don't like them.

You can't pretend there is some "impersonal force like the weather" doing this: it's a small group of people, and you're in it.

The fact that you absolutely didn't change a thing about my proposal at all, and got someone hostile like Untameable to turn around on it shows what a tribal action this is. It's not about substance. It's about "follow-the-leader".

And the fact that you yourself didn't change a thing, and yet somehow, my proposal magically went from being "anti-community" to being "useful" is just downright exposure again of the deep tribalism at play here.

So now it turns out not that the act of consent is "anti-community" (how could it be?! it should strengthen community) and not the act of resisting the will of a minority is "anti-community" (how could it be? they are just the minority who think they know better". What is "anti-community" is telling the truth about this little group of coders who close everybody's proposals, and have backing by busy Lindens who in fact dumbed down the JIRA to take away consent.

Sorry, that just doesn't cut it. You can't put up proposals without putting the reason for them. Otherwise, the people doing this think there is no argument, and that just manually re-opening your proposal when somebody else closes it is a solution.

Who said it was anti-community? DID anyone actually say that? What was their name, and in which post?

Can it be assumed that since the proposal hasn't been substantially altered (Prok has simply re-inserted her finger-pointing) that it's now agreed that it should be a way forward on a propsal that can be voted up and hopefully gain LL's attention?

And can anyone tell me how come I'm displaying Naziish behaviour for taking a stand, while Prokofy is simply "right"?

People, JIRA is not for subjective points of view. It's supposed to be objective. "A group of people I don't happen to like should never be allowed to close things" is a subjective point of view. Why does it absolutely have to be included in the proposal?

The time I spent writing this response could have been spent doing productive things. It isn't a productive use of my time to debate proper etiquette. Your ideas of etiquette are built into the feature suggestion which is why people don't support it. Changing how it is said, changes the etiquette: streamlines it, removes the ugly bits, makes it palatable.

When you are selling a product you don't tell ethnic jokes or make derogatory comments as it shows your prejudice; you never know who might just be a "coder". The thing you haven't grasped is that the people who you so dislike are respected members of the community. They are respected because they understand the code and submit patches to fix the code; they understand what is going on, what can be done and they are committing to do it. Essentially you are alienating anyone and everyone who wants to be an expert or productive member in this community. You are slandering coders and how can you be so sure they are all coders; by making the accusation you sound like a bigot. No matter how good a suggestion is, if you slap people in the face They Will Not Listen. Truth or not, you can't say.

What is your goal here? Inflame the community or get things changed. You don't need to look in Pandora's Box to bolt it shut.

--------------

Personally I see community pressure as a necessary part of what defines a community. Communities should be suspect of change, they need a way to stave it off, lest they be hijacked by the Hitlers, Maos or Stalins of the world.

rolls eyes Hello Godwin's Law

--------------

I am in favor of checks, balances & compromises. Neither party should be entitled exclusively to the assumption that they are correct. A key tenon of SL design is the idea of a level playing field. Just because someone says their opinion first doesn't make it more or less valid then the person who says theirs second.

• a renaming of "Resolved" (part of my WEB-247 mentions this)
• automatic e-mail notification to the authors of issues (Lex's WEB-335 would provide this)
• strict software enforcement of a 30-day timeout of Resolved->Closed instead of the current lax enforcement of "a while"
• allowing votes during the renamed "Resolved" (which sounds kinda like the logical extension of WEB-380)

Can this be split into its subtasks like such?

(Also, Strife, how'd you edit your post? o.o I don't see any edit buttons.) [edit] Okay, now I see a button....

(Happy New Year, everyone. )

(yeah I just discovered the edit button today too, I was like "OMG there is an edit button!" and I did a little dance)

But this can't be about your own little tribe. Second Life has to be big, diverse, and more than anything:
U - S - A -B - L -E.

It isprecisely because a small group of coders REFUSE to listen to common sense, reason, feedback, and just plain ordinary talk from people U - S - I - N - G Second Life.

Spiked war clubs are ALREADY in use here, Strife. What kind of name do you have? "Strife". What kind of name does WarKirby have? "Warkirby". .There are clubs and wars and banging on heads everywhere, with really nasty talk that has nothing to do with me in the lion's share of instances, but is even how you talk to each other. Your flowery metaphors are misplaced.

The feature suggestion identifies a problem that many of us share. It's hard for you to take as it directly affects you and your small group that keep closing stuff. Well, deal with it. It has to be usable for a lot of people, not just an elaborate exercise in making neat little packaged coding projects on obscure aspects of the softare.

I don't need little hectoring lessons from you about "what I haven't grasped" (rolls eyes). The people here you respect are NOT respected by all because coding isn't everything, and understanding code and submitting patches is only one feature of software. Software has to be U S A B L E. And doing that takes a separate set of skills and mechanisms, and that means consent, the right to say no, the right to keep closed little minds opening up again to hear the public's voice.

I'm telling the truth about the situation; your characterization of this as 'slander" is silly. You worship coders and feel they are god-like. I don't. You're the bigot, assuming that everyone who isn't a coder can't criticize, can't tell the truth. We all see the truth here. Don't pull the stunts you pull on the forums – it can't fly here. There is really much more serious task here which is to GET SECOND LIFE WORKING BETTER. So please, step out of the way of stopping that from happening.

People haven't listened for the entire year the JIRA has been run. They've just crashed headline into doing what they always do, which is form little clans and chat on the IRC and pat each other on the back and feel superior, while Rome burns.

What is YOUR goal, but to hector, posture, and feel superior with this kind of admonishing post? There was no need to edit a thing in my suggestion, and by politically editing, you show your hand.

What astounds me is that you imagine that someone resisting the little Hitlers, Maos and Stalins who close proposals made in good faith in a peremptory and prejudicial fashion as themselves some kind of Hitlers, Maos, or Stalins.

Good grief, that's insane, Strife, surely you're smarter than that. You keep speaking about "the community" as if a) you define it and b) you represent it when...you do neither. Stop that. There isn't any "Stalin" involved in creating a very necessary check and balance to the power you and your club here have usurped.

A level playing field in Second Life doesn't mean giving coders special powers to run others and rule the community – which they alone define and control. A level playing field doesn't mean you subdue others to some level. It means access to all to the tools, so that they work equally – equal access. Outcomes don't have to be the same regarding skills, but ACCESS must be equal. And in order to stop those who imagine themselves to be "in the know" from always slamming and killing others, writing "OMG THAT's INSANE" at any post made in good faith just because it has my name on it, for example, you need this simple toggle.

Nobody can even say their opinion second when their proposal is closed, and they have to run the gauntlet of hostile closers to keep it open and keep votes running. This needs to be halted. The software was configured originally to allow people to retain control over their proposals!!!

If you don't like the language, you can make your own proposal and stop jamming on this one.

I've also removed language making it seem that the reason people's proposals are disliked or closed is being they are "miscommunicated" or formulated poorly. That is an unfair criticism of the layman, as most people are just complaining about what hurts in the best way they know how, on this very clunky, and non-user-friendly device. They shouldn't be savaged for that – they are not to blame. If someone comes up with a better wording or match of the issue, they can simply offer it, without having to condemn the person making the proposal in this very hostile setting as "unable to formulate and communicate their proposal".

This idea that the world would clutter up with gadzillion "forever" unclosed/uncloseable proposals is just FUD – FUD coming from the little tribe in power.

It's ridiculous, as most people are rational, and will readily concede any logical argument put to them. They can do their own closing, for God's sake. If some janitorially-minded need to go around closing, they can learn to do this with some care and thought and make better arguments.

If we're going to have all sorts of denunciations of "subjectivity" here, let's note that it doesn't accrue only to me, or people who disagree with the coders' cabal, shall we?

Subjectivity starts first and foremost with this group. They're the ones going around closing everything. They're the ones riling and annoying people who don't feel their issues should be closed so peremptorily – or wrongfully.

In fact, what we have isn't "a group of people who I don't like shouldn't be allowed to close things"; what we have here is a group that says "we don't like some people and we're allowed to close things we don't like".

My proposal is to create a SYSTEM to stop that hazardous subjectivity, pure and simple, so that all proposals have equal access and time to gain support and votes, and to refine their cases.

"It is too easy for feature suggestions and bugs to be prematurely closed." = Objective

"A small group of coders here on JIRA are constantly closing and resolving issues in the belief that they know best, yet they do this at times without consent and support. This results in undue pressures and discontent, and makes it very hard for the author to re-open his proposal in the face of hostility." = Subjective

"By providing the authors with a feedback period some of this can be avoided and if deemed appropriate the issue in jeopardy can be kept open." = Objective

One only has to see what went on here and at your blog to see the problem with subjectivity. Firstly, in your blog you subjectively inferred that I was a member of this "cabal" and outright said I was a member of this "tribe" that goes around closing JIRA tickets. Neither of which is actually true, because with the exception of this one I don't remember closing, or even trying to close, ANY other JIRA issues. Not one.

And yet because you insisted on subjectively portraying me as among this "cabal", this "tribe" I was insulted by you and by others, referred to as "naziish" - can you see why I object to someone being very broad and subjective AND INSULTIVE in the same proposal and its resulting thread?

You're quite willing to trot out "I've been insulted/I've been shouted down" here, but YOU weren't the one called Naziish as a result of their objections. It's completely hypocrytical of you to continue to bemoan people telling you that they feel your idea is wrong, when you don't condemn, and in fact actually appear to condone, that kind of language being used against others.

What gives YOU the right to be any more correct than, for instance, Strife? On the one hand you say "you don't have the right to change this" but on the other you say "I will not tolerate this being changed, this stays in and that's final". There is a double standard at work here.

Your proposal, brought back to basics, is fine to propose. Your using that to deliberately provoke and insult others is not. That seems to be what you can't grasp, that all the parts of the objective proposal as it now stands are fine, but all the subjective attacks on others are not.

What's subjective is your – and their – belief they can and should do this, against people's wills.

I would never think to close someone's proposal, or rewrite their description of their own proposal by going into the edit box and tampering with their text. That's just plain wrong. It's destructive and abusive. I don't care that "wikipedia" and "social media" create these memes that this is "ok". It's not. What I would do is add links, dupes, comments, etc. And then the person who made the proposal himself can consolidate the suggestions and do as he will. That's according *the right and dignity of the individual" instead of pressing with the mob.

It's not "subjective" to report what's going on here: a small group of people ARE closing these proposals! They're visible closing this one! They're visible all over the JIRA, the same people! You can't deny the facts.

These so-called "objective" renderings of these facts by removing agent and cause and therefore accountability are in fact entirely politicized and subjective.

My proposal restores the individual's right to control his creation, and gives space for him to gather input and votes without fighting off hostile closers whose main goal is just to make everything "tidy" and "ordered" in their own notion of how the JIRA-verse should look.

No, I don't think Strife, Lindens, or anyone should tamper with the description of a proposal. It completely obliterates work and the author's intent. Make proposals, and if someone likes them, they put it in themselves.

There's nothing that 'provokes" in my proposal. It describes the reason and necessity for this proposal. By rewriting it, Strife and others are trying to deny the reality of what goes on here (including right in this thread) and trying to avoid accountability.

By having a consent toggle – restoring the original function of the software! – we can end this lack of accountability by putting a check and balance back in the hands of content-creators who can then consent to any suggestions made in the spirit of collaboration, rather than in the spirit of collectivism and conformity.

This means any such change will be months (3+) away, may want to consider accepting the fact that this is not going to happen.

While don't like squashing one idea without providing another:

maybe enable the owner of a jira issue to "lock" it only allowing him/linden's to do anything other than comment on it. not sure if this feature exists either though, so all my points above may apply.

same disclaimer as before, 2 cents, don't take it for more than its worth

You say that NOBODY should alter the description of a proposal, and you include the Lindens in this. So let's combine things.

Somebody writes a proposal, and includes in it the fact that they believe (subjectively, I might add) that someone is a nazi for whatever behaviour that the proposal is against. Despite the fact that it's obviously abusive and provocative, and given the fact that under your proposal NOBODY should adjust it except its author, then give us a YES or NO - should it still stand that nobody can touch that plainly offensive - and subjective - description of the proposal?

If we review the current incarnation of this proposal... "Bugs and Proposals on the JIRA Should Having A Pending Period To Allow For Review Before Resolution" ... I think the wording is poor as "Resolution" seems to be being used in place of "Closed", whereas the JIRA uses the word RESOLUTION to mean the current status of a ticket / proposal.

There are currently 6 posible resolution status for a ticket. Open, Re-Opened, In Progress, Resolved, Fix Pending and Closed....

When a ticket is submitted it is in the "Open" status.. . if it is accepted and is being worked on it moves to In Progress and from their to Fix Pending when a fix is in QA
A new ticket may also be "Resolved" with one of 8 different resolutions. When this happens it is then up to the origional submitter to mark their ticket / proposal as "Closed"

--------

From https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Issue_tracker regarding Issue States:

Please take note of the definition of "RESOLVED"

Issue States
Available states
Here is how Linden Lab is using the resolutions:

Open
This is an issue that belongs to the Assignee to resolve. The assignee may fix the issue, or kick the issue back to the reporter by marking it "Resolved" (see below)
In Progress
This is how a developer signals to everyone that he/she is working on the issue.
Reopened
same as "Open".
Resolved
This is an implicit assignment back to the reporter of the issue. It is not closed yet, but rather in a state of limbo that depends on the resolution. It's up to the Reporter to decide whether to reopen an issue, or close it.
Fixed
means that the bug is fixed in a public release of Second Life.
Fix Pending
means that the bug is fixed in a version of the code that should soon be publicly available.
Won't Fix
means that the assignee doesn't believe this issue should ever be fixed.
Duplicate
means that there's some other issue that describes the same problem/idea.
Needs More Info
this issue lacks information
Cannot Reproduce
we're applying this label pretty liberally. Please provide a detailed description of how to reproduce a problem. Issues that can't be reproduced will eventually be closed.
Misfiled
this issue doesn't belong in this issue tracker.
Closed
The final resting place.

All that remains is the automated conversion of Resolved to Closed. I suggestion that the extraneousness language that describes the system that is already in place be stripped so that the new and novel features of this proposal can be better served.

The Wiki is written by...whom? Anyone. Anyone can come in and decide "it means this," and someone else can come and decide, no, it means that...and that's what's wrong with wikis.

All you have to do is step one step away from this little magic circle here and see how ridiculous a definition of the word "resolved" is if it says "This is an implicit assignment back to the reporter of the issue. It is
not closed yet, but rather in a state of limbo that depends on the resolution. It's up to the Reporter to decide whether to reopen an issue, or close it.

Ordinal Malaprop has rightly mounted a JIRA proposing that the meaning of "resolved" be clarified to mean exactly what it means all over the rest of the known metaverse and universe – fixed, done, over.

"Resolution" means decision, not "implicit assignment."

All that's happened with this fake "resolution" is that the small group of coders are saying "we don't like your proposal, it doesn't fit for us, and we want to force you to conform to our ideas by working harder to align y our idea with what we find acceptable". That's wrong.

It undermines the person's proposal by implying that they have something wrong with them, and have to take some further action.

A good examine is this very proposal. It's simple. It's crystal clear. The verbal suggestion about a time limit is incorporated into it. There's nothing wrong with it. It doesn't need "more work". To mark it as "resolved" by forcing the author to "find more examples" or "rewrite it until it is politicall correct" is just busy-work.

Meanwhile, marking something as resolved is merely a political action to stop voting.

Sorry, but the job here isn't to take this warped meaning of "resolved" written by some anonymous Wiki contributor (or tell us who wrote this), the job is to get the public's common sense here working to that the small group sees reason.

Strife's idea is truly appalling. It means that if someone marks something as "resolved" – which they often do because they don't like it, don't feel like working it through, don't feel it's a priority, it automatically heads to "closed".

This will lead to people re-opening issues constantly – amid hostility. It will decrease participation in the JIRA – but then, that's your goal, Strife.

Sorry, there isn't any enlightenment here, only more of the Dark Ages.

Bear with me, people, it DOES have a bearing on the issue we're discussing.

If you answered NO, it still shouldn't be edited by anyone, including the Lindens, to my hypothetical JIRA ticket that mentioned a group or individual was a nazi along with the proposal it was discussing, then you derail all your arguments, because you prove that under your original, non time limited proposal (yes, I know you talked about a time limit in the comments, but you did not include it in the proposal) you would be creating an environment totally suited to griefers. Since you've also declared you are against banning people from JIRA, that situation is untenable.

Whereas, if you'd answered YES, somebody should have the authority to edit the proposal and remove offensive parts, then you derail your arguments here, too - because that's just what people did, removing the finger pointing, and you insisted it be put back again. And who would edit it? The Lindens? They haven't the manpower to keep track of a JIRA open to having new tickets raised by millions of people.

Face it, your proposition, far from trying to make the JIRA more fair, when it boils down to it, is just a proposal for anarchy, accompanied by insulting anyone who opposes it. The only way to keep on top of a ticketing system that is open for over a million people to be using simultaneously, is by trusting that other parts of that huge audience take some form of responsibility for closing the duplicates, resolving things that aren't actually a bug and editing objectionable suggestions. The Lindens have neither the time nor the raw manpower to do it. And it's not ideal, everyone accepts that, but at least it's WORKABLE. Your proposal wasn't, and your idea still isn't.

Nobody appointed you to crusade for what you see is right. Nobody gave you the right to say "No, that isn't right", or "you're the one invading and policing" or "you're taking a biased and wrongful position" or any of the other schoolteacher-like telling offs you've handed down from on high to contributors to this thread. Nobody appointed you right and everyone else wrong. We have a system. It isn't perfect, but then the whole reason this JIRA exists is that SL is so bug-ridden it needs an ongoing method to point out where things have been broken, especially when the authors seem hell-bent on introducing new content rather than fixing old content.

You even actually wrote, all those comments ago, "Most people have the good sense to concede that their issue must be closed if compelling arguments are made." Well, we've gone around full circle on this, and some compelling arguments have been made. Isn't it about time you showed some of that 'good sense' you talked about, or are you going to merely dismiss any arguments against you as 'tribal' and 'cabalistic'?

I do agree that there should be a "no" vote option. Looking at the way JIRA works, and the statistics it can generate for the administrators, the yes voting system appears in a number of breakdowns, and I'm thinking that voting up a suggestion with lots of YES votes highlights it for review by administrators. It appears to be a ticketing system written to draw attention to popular suggestions so that the less popular or the unpopular ones simply aren't highlighted... and that's not perfect either, but LL didn't write JIRA so take any complaints about THAT to the authors of the JIRA system.

This proposal, as you wrote it, is unworkable. It breaks even more a ticketing system that is already less than perfect, by introducing a dangerous idea that tickets should be uneditable and trusting everyone to always be sensible and honourable in their ticket creation. That just isn't going to happen. Plus you'd like to waste lots of storage space and slow down the system by not allowing people who might be inherently lazy and create a ticket because they get angry about something they've encountered, without noticing that their ticket is a duplicate of fifty other tickets, by waiting for them to close it.

"The public's common sense" in this proposal is to say 'don't vote for it'. Those who have come here and only left a single, short comment, have said that. Melissa, who you ignored altogether; Jacek, who you shouted at; Shwartz, who you dismissively ignored the point he was making; Nika, who you treated like a schoolteacher might treat a pupil they thought had failed. ALL these people just posted their honest, public's common sense outlooks. None supported you. Your own words point to the true reason for your proposal "The job is to get the publics common sense here working [against the group I don't like]" - well, guess what. The public have their own, independant view, like Melissa, Jacek, Shwartz, Nika - and it's that this proposal doesn't go anywhere and should NOT be voted for.

I don't like the idea of summarily banning someone for refusing to play by the rules either, but that's really all that's left if someone consistently just ignores everyone else to keep their own issue going on and on and on and on and on, which is what's going on here. We've discussed it, debated it, most of the time kept civil about it and at the end of the day it doesn't help anything, and in fact opens loopholes that could easily be exploited by those who have mischief in mind. Reworded parts of the proposal do work, and I support those parts that do - but seriously, Prok, give the finger pointing, schoolteacher lecturing and posturing about secret cabals, tribes and "techie-wikis" a break. What we have works. Lets move on to issues that don't.

(edited to fix grammar in a few places)

https://wiki.secondlife.com/w/index.php?title=Issue_tracker&oldid=17278

I'm not going to sit and play word games here with you Prokofy. You have your view and you're welcome to it. If others in the SL community feel the same as you, they are more than welcome to step up and say so.

I do not Resolve things that I don't like. I resolve things on the JIRA that are misfiled, fixed, duplicate or that need re-validated for the current version of SL.

I also will go back and re-open a ticket I have marked resolved if new facts are provided that merit the re-opening of that issue.

Honestly, this proposal has never been about the policy or mechanics of how the JIRA works, as the underlying complaint was to propose that the JIRA policy be what it has always been (and documented as such on April 16th)

Personally, I will continue to do what I have been doing on the JIRA and encourage anyone else who wants to help to do so, but make sure you have read and understand the information from https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Issue_tracker.

It would be useful if Rob Linden, in contemplating this BETA SOFTWARE – remember this is in BETA AND CAN BE CHANGED – would review actual practical experience and responses from the community at large, not just the small group of coders – and consider updating his notion of *eight months ago of the meaning of the word "RESOLVED".

This is especially urgent as the use of the term [RESOLVED] on the blog means "well and truly finished," not "go back to the drawing board."

It's especially important that Rob, as leader of this project assigned by LL, consider the definition of "Resolved" he came up with back in the day, and remove such vague and subjective wording as "implicit assignment" or "state of limbo" or "decide whether to reopen".

All of those "states" are better expressed with the word PENDING instead of RESOLVED.

And once you have a motion for PENDING a response to closure that is consensual, and toggled within 30 days, you have a roughly viable system, in part (lacking only the ability to vote "no" on proposals).

This proposal indeed is about changing a bad practice on the JIRA, and bringing back consent and ownership of proposals, so that they are not precipitously or unjustly closed.

It's not necessary within the title to get into the details about the 30-day review period which is in the text of the proposal.

I also don't like the idea that with this title about a "pending period" which is ostensibly only "for review before resolution," there is still prejudice in favour of those who go around closing proposals all the time, with their assumption that all proposals that remain open "have something wrong with them" unless the "group" supports keeping them open (and they often don't).

The concept is simple: author's consent is needed. Full stop.

Untameable, you're doing what most people would call "trolling" and "baiting". I guess when I see long-winded contentious beefs such as yours, I realize you haven't read what I wrote very well, or you wouldn't be able to stand around indignantly baiting me with questions like "yes or no!".

I also rely on the intelligence of most people in this discussion, even those who are antagonistic to me, to see through your techniques. They don't require a response.

Prokofy, when people try to be sensible and make changes to reflect this discussion and offer compromises (like Strife did), you're even making fun of them. Commenting on Strife's name is as ridiculous as insisting that jihad just means holy war (and before you scream blue murder, as a historical linguist I know what I'm talking about here, really)."Strife", as is German "streiten", means argue as well as struggle (for something), which, incidentally, "jihad" also means. Go on, twist around what I say and use it against me - from your comments here I see that is your favourite pastime.

As a linguist, I also wonder what your definition of "community" is. Does it even have the idea of community leaders? Or are we talking anarchy here? It sounds like a twisted vision of grassroots democracy and anarchy, at the same time saying everything the "government" (in this case, LL) does is somehow flawed and has to be countered, and asking for everybody else's permission to close a JIRA issue even though it might be something irrelevant, wrongly posted, duplicate, or whatever. Doesn't work. If all those people who take on the task of reading JIRA issues, sorting out duplicates, linking stuff, or even closing things were to vanish, what would happen? If those you you call coders, making it sound like an insult, really-if those people were to leave, what would happen? No one is infallible, but your world only seems to consist of black and white.

I suggest looking up the original meaning of "meritocracy" and "democracy" as well as "petty".

You asked which group I belong to- I never saw the need to belong to any cabal, but if you insist -I am most certainly not in whatever group you claim to be, Prokofy.
I just felt I have to comment on this issue again so it doesn't seem like only a handful of people will be at the receiving end of Prokofy's wrath; those who keep commenting.

Untameable, you're doing what most people would call "trolling" and "baiting". I guess when I see long-winded contentious beefs such as yours, I realize you haven't read what I wrote very well, or you wouldn't be able to stand around indignantly baiting me with questions like "yes or no!".

No, I'm not. There are parts to this argument, counter arguments, that you will not go near, because you recognise that to confront them derails the proposal and demonstrates how you will only let it stand if it points fingers and accuses people. Backing you into a corner where a straight yes or no answer is required isn't trolling, it's driving you to see what other people already see - that aspects of your proposal were (and if you had your way, would be again) unworkable.

Trolling is deliberately asking spurious questions, baiting someone away from the talking point of the actual proposal. Read what I've said carefully, it all relates to the actual proposal. My yes or no question related to a hypothetical situation based upon the premise that your entire original proposal was adopted and implemented. It isn't trolling to ask whether you would condone, if your original proposal was adopted, the behaviour I described.

But you don't want to go there, because it might reveal that the entire proposal was pointless, and if the entire suggestion is pointless, well, let me strip it down to what would be left:

"A small group of coders here on JIRA are constantly closing and resolving issues in the belief that they know best, yet they do this at times without consent and support. This results in undue pressures and discontent, and makes it very hard for the author to re-open his proposal in the face of hostility." And what does that boil down to? "I want my voice heard, but people keep closing my tickets as spurious.

That's the trolling, not making you confront the situation you're trying to propose.

I love technology, it's amazing what you can do with it but it saddens me that I will be using it to mute you. You only see trees and only those you like. I have tired to be accommodating, but you won't have any of it.

For those interested here is the GreaseMonkey script I wrote, it is easy to add new users to it.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/18817

There is no community.

You do not speak for it.

You are not the leader of it.

The opinions of the few against the majority must always be protected. Mob rule is not community.

Your notion of "accommodating" is to whitewash, suppress, water down, obliterate. Non pasarant!

There is no community - but there is a community of people who qualify as a small group of coders

Strife does not speak for a community, but Prokofy does

Strife is not a community leader but Prokofy is.

Again, what about the opinions of the majority, as evidenced by Melissa, Jacek, Shwartz, Nika et al. They arrived with neutral interest, looked at the proposition, said they hated it and moved on. Does there word count for nothing, or are they part of the "mob rule" too?

What gives you the right to tell people off as if you were a schoolteacher, and yet tell someone else they don't speak for anyone?

Your notion of "accommodating" is clearly 'something Prok has no interest in doing'

A small group of coders aren't "the community". I realize it's popular among themselves, and accepted, to call themselves THE community. But they aren't.

There is no such thing. There are many diverse groups in Second Life, with a huge multiplicity of levels and understandings.

Strife doesn't even speak on behalf of these coders, frankly.

I sure don't say that I speak on behalf of anybody, as you falsely imply, but I merely express my opinion. I don't claim any backing, leadership, representative capacity or anything but the ability to say, "I prefer not to, and here's a better suggestion."

The people who take part in this particular thread's discussion don't represent any "community" or any "public" either. They are a dozen or so – nothing representative of a thing.

The voting on these things is horribly false – they lurch from being flashmobbed to being catch-alls for general community angst, and even when they have legitimate popular support, there isn't a viable way to adjust the proposal like a Congressional mark-up commmittee because...anybody can erase, close, resolve, skew, shut down, silence, and now, as we see, even mute.

As I noted in my other proposal, the JIRA isn't a very good way to discuss feature proposals in a community with very many different – and conflicting in places – interests.

But now the fun begins: I'm going to argue both sides.

If there is no community then I can be it's representative as there is nobody who need give permission or in a position to object. You have proclaimed it doesn't exist but if does you are ignorant of it and any official appointments, there is no way for you to know if I am the duly appointed representative or not, I could even be it's leader.

Nowhere have I said I am a community representative or leader but coincidently I was recognized by LL as Best Community Organizer Of The Year.

I see now, you are libertarian socialist (or in one of the closely related groups of thought). Arguing is probably pointless, we do not agree on the fundamentals and I doubt there is anything either of us could say that would change the other persons opinions enough that we would agreed; frankly I'm not interested in spending all eternity proving or disproving that axiom. Considering the outpouring of support this suggestion had in it's original incarnation it is probably safe to assume that most Jira users aren't libertarian socialists (or they would be jumping at the opportunity to forward libertarian socialist goals as they are a maligned minority).

sigh
"Pasarant" isn't spelled with a "t", it's Spanish, "¡No pasarán!" is a slogan from the the First World War that was latter resurrected by Spanish Communists during the Spanish Civil War and subsequently adopted by left the world over. If you knew the modern history of the phrase you wouldn't use it when also arguing against mob rule; it is a phrase that has been shouted by militant mobs, it's bathed in blood. Shouting a mob rallying cry suggests an ugly double standard.

Saying "there is no community" isn't "anti-community," because there isn't one, truly. It is a statement of fact, said in hope that in fact there might some day be a real one. A handful of coders who have seized control of a facility like this isn't "the community". The "the" part is something they arrogate to themselves. They don't represent the diverse interests and groups and levels of understanding of the world – and cannot represent it.

When LL recognized you as "Best Community Organizer of the Year," they were lauding you in a category of "the coders," not the community writ large, in any broad – and normal – understanding of the word "community". This award was issued as "the Hippo Awards" which is a narrow set of interests by merely one set of Lindens working on programming issues. They often use the term "the community" to mean "their own kind". That doesn't mean it's right, or legitimate. It's not. Perhaps in their book, you are the "best organizers of this little group of coders who imagine they are the community". Well, bravo.

I'm not a libertarian, or a socialist, as I reject both ideologies as unnecessarily restrictive of the open society, and either an enemy of open society, or a false utopianism – in SL, libertarianism can take very monstrous forms. Um, if I'm a "libertarian socialist," uh...I don't know what that makes you, an anarcho-capitalist? But it's not particularly interesting to bandy about labels and argue pat theories like some college bull session with an interlocutor who isn't legitimate because he believes in muting people.

The idea here is one of simple democracy. Through democratic procedures, propositions are put up to a vote. You don't keep erasing, rewriting, and closing the proposition on a ballot, in a larger democratic society. In a smaller democratic procedure, say, at work or school, you don't keep obliterating people's ideas and work in order to enable an unsupported minority to keep running roughshod.

I'm well aware of the history of "no pasaran," as I probably learned the word before you were born, and from people who fought in the Spanish Civil War, whereas you probably just read it off the Internet. If I've mispelled it, it's merely a mistake. I don't get all pretentious and go fetching fonts not on my regular keyboard. I'm no celebrator of bloody left-wing rioting, trust me. But in the historical context, it was a cry against fascism. The saying is also used in a lot of democratic and not-so-democratic but revolutionary movements. Here, it's just said in its literal meeting, "They shall not pass" – or, "We won't let this pass,"

Let's go back to your favourite Wikipedia, and read its deeper history:

'"They shall not pass" (French: "Ils ne passeront pas", Spanish: "¡No pasarán!") is a propaganda slogan used to express determination to defend a position against an enemy. It was most famously used during the Battle of Verdun in World War I by French General Robert Nivelle (although some have attributed it to his commander, Philippe Pétain). It appears on propaganda posters, such as that by Maurice Neumont after the Second Battle of the Marne, which was later adopted on uniform badges by units manning the Maginot Line."

As I've pointed out, mob rule isn't community. And what we have here with "the community" as iterated by the coders isn't some open society with consent, but a kind of band of Bolsheviks who constantly imagine themselves to be the avante-garde, and everybody else the unenlightened masses. There is a constant refrain of the need to "educate the public" on the skewed and tendentious meanings of terms like "resolved," when in fact your beloved "wisdom of the crowd" would tell you that "resolved" doesn't mean "sent back to the drawing board under extreme prejudice".

I'm sure you'll want to be remembered in the history of the JIRA as the person who created the "mute" script for users to block out people they don't like, and argumentation they can't bear to hear. Progress!

They are indeed representative of something. Those dozen participants represent a dozen valid viewpoints. You already rejected the idea that any community representation can exist at all, and now you reject individual viewpoints? You poor lonely thing.

Back on-topic: I agree that the Close/Resolve/Reopen transitions are not the smoothest (partly because those actions/states are not well-named). But I personally prefer the existing tool and process over your suggested change. I hope you or someone else proposes a better solution. But until then, I hope the suggestion as presented does not pass and that we use our energy for creating, fixing – and sometimes reopening – real issues that really matter.

(And Strife, thanks for the spam filter

The point here, as is obvious and doesn't need clarification for those willing to exercise common sense and good faith, is that you cannot claim you are "the community" (especially "the" but even "any") just because you have a little group. It's a very loaded term, and one that coders constantly bandy about, but with no legitimacy. There is no community. Communities are made up of people freely associating around a set of shared goals, beliefs, activities, etc. Merely breathing the same air or being forced by circumstances to use the same JIRA, many against their will (shows you how desperate people are for the real thing!) is not something that makes up "the community".

I think you may have also missed the memo, becky, that the Lindens themselves have now changed and clarified some of the JIRA meanings (http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/01/03/3-fresh-improvements-to-our-issue-tracker/) That's proof positive that they're capable of listening to common sense and weighing opinion and clarifying problematic issues, like this "fixed internally" which was so misleading in that it promised a fix really coming when it wasn't. That lets us know that unlike their more rigidly conservative fans, they can change this software that is still in its Beta stage when it needs changing. That would also suggest that hewing to the official line uber alles isn't prudent.

As for celebrating a "spam filter" by which you mean "screening out opinions and suggestions from people I don't like who don't believe as I do," if you call yourself a scientist, I'd have to wonder how you justify the removal of feedback from your experiments.

Prok is right....there is no community here...there is a group of OS-fanatics and assorted coder-hangers on to Rob Linden. Hell, Prok could say that its light at noon on a cloudless day and you could count on Warkirby, thraxis, untameable, and others coming up with reasons why she's wrong and its really dark.

NO PLAYER should be allowed to run roughshod over other players, and that is exactly what happens in the JIRA...that is NOT community, that is vigilate justice system. An adult with the last name LINDEN and NOT connected with the current OS movement that runs the JIRA should be the final authority over players, not a mythical community that merely consists of OS cultists and thier 'high-priest', Rob Linden.

And Strife, quit being a baby with the 'mute' script. Can't handle it since you can't silence others here like you did on the forums, so you have to resort to muting them? Childish, but expected of the OS cult followers.

On the one extreme, you have the white-washed and dumbed-down politicized expression of Strife, when he mangled my original characterization of the problem of the small group of coders closing items with prejudice. He changed it to, "It is too easy for feature suggestions and bugs to be prematurely closed. The authors involved should be given some time to give feedback and if necessary keep the issue open."

You've essentially put it very starkly: there is the high priest Rob Linden and his acolytes X Y and Z and it is all hopeless except to sing in the choir.

So what is to be done? I've tried to grasp this nettle by insisting a) on characterizing the problem accurately (it is about a small group) and suggesting a process that this small group shouldn't be able to object to, in principle, if they are sincere, or feign to be sincere.

The fact that Strife basically rubber-stamped my proposal once he rewrote the preamble is proof of that fact that the group has no legitimate objections to having a grace period for people to consent to closures, and if they don't, to leave them alone, and not characterize them as "resolved". To be sure, Strife expected to simply roll over these non-closers who wouldn't be persuaded, and figured they'd be "won over" to conformism within 30 days.

I don't expect them to be, but I also don't think they will ever be a very large group. Most people will either understand the validity of a closure, or they will back off, not being able or willing to spend the time to learn the issue deeply enough to argue through. That's sad, as that does mean a cabal does govern the masses illegitimately by preying on their lack of capacity, or their indfference. But we can't fix that problem at this level of the JIRA.

There must be consent of the governed. Making a proposal for a feature or bug find/prioritization is a bold civic action, and frankly, one in which people are very easily intimidated. In fact, there's even a proposal urging the small group to stop slamming proposals down rhetorically (not a very practical proposal, but a cry from the heart).

I'm amazed to see the dozens of creative and persistent proposals to address the scourage of ad-farming, each with numerous supporters – hundreds of people clearing the considerably daunting hurdles of the JIRA to try to address this awful problem of sign extortionism.

This process has to be helped, not hindered. It has to be helped by empowering all as good citizens, not announting from above only a small cabal as "the good citizens". This janitorial work is simply excessive.

Rob Linden is basically just a guy doing a job, not any particular cult maniac (I've met and talked to him in real life, and while I don't agree with his world view, I don't think he's an extremist – he can't be, and hold done the real job that he does). The helpers on the other hand are anonymous, unaccountable, and extremist, and often malicious, and downright frenzied about removing others, arguing with them, discrediting them, slamming them needlessly, and even wrongfully.

I've gone around and opened up a half dozen issues recently (in addition to this one) on a wide variety of issues just because I've been appalled to see that in fact it is worse than I knew, and that it is indeed easy to collect examples. Example: Somebody urges that web forms be created for abuse reports because often the abuse attacks paralyze your avatar or your game is crashed. Web forms would have other advantages too, like being less laggy, and with more room. The G-team is even announcing lately that they are going to make web AR forms soon. So why would the person who proposes this be greeted with a sneer and a slam? And told certain kinds of griefing that paralyzes you really isn't at issue any more, because you can just log in at another location (that's not effective for animate-your-avatar spam, however).

The issue is finally closed and Lex tells them, oh, write abuse@lindenlab.com in Sept 2007 – when that address had already ceased to function by that time and was closed. So here, a good idea, an idea that eevn the Lindens are supposedly working on, and idea therefore that could use some customer feedback and prompting for progress reports, is killed off by the overzealous custodians of the group.

How to stop this sort of thing? By sending a sharp unmistakeable signal that they have to stop. They should focus on finding bugs and making their own feature propopsals, and stop picking on other people's. They are not here to govern and police and cherry-pick what they like; they are here to make their own proposals and bug reports.

What these zealots are able to do is invoke some fear of some huge influx of open-ended problems and cluttery badly-written proposals. But hey, that's ridiculous. There aren't that many proposals here. Some 1,000 are open. So? If they bother you, filter them, focus on the topics you can do something about. Leave other people's content alone. Let them find their own natural interlocutors, not police janitors, to help them improve. Nobody closed feature proposals on the old Feature Voting Tool – there was no way to do it. In just a week or so, Angel Fluffy zealously spent night and day "cleaning it up" – but of course, with prejudice, and without consent. Then it was completely destroyed as an institution and a body of content (for shame, Lindens!)

Basically, this is not a way to run a railroad, or even ride a railroad. You have to have democratic participation, meaningful participation, and the right of the participator not to be destroyed. He must have consent to be governed. You can't assign overlords to "manage" everybody when they have no legitimacy – they aren't elected or chosen from below. Feature proposals especially need to be free from the over-busy hands of coders who want to eliminate everything they don't like off the list so that they can just get what they want, which tends to be over-elaborate, over-complex, and exotic featured software, not a USEABLE PRODUCT. Geeks and prima dona designers can agonize whether avatars' little feet leaves shadows, or whether the sunlight bleeds on to the horizon and just the right pitch and length, but the rest of us just want to be able to fly around without lag and not look like death warmed over. They are in a different second life, and that's fine, but that can't be allowed to interfere with the broader second life of the general public.

75 percent or more of what is on the JIRA now is not a showstopper, not a priority, interesting or needed by only a tiny percentage of people interested in the exotics of code functioning, and not even comprehensible to the majority of the population at large.

It's really important, if you bother to have a public JIRA, that prompt, effective, and visible action be taken on the 25 percent that does matter and really does prove an obstacle to Second Life. Therefore those who have true civic-mindedness, and aren't just showing off, need to stop trying harry and trump every passing proposla, but focus on getting this very visible and needed 25 percent solved, patched, and pushed to completion, If they don't want to do that, fine, but the Lindens then need to keep a focus on it, and not let the most important pieces for the broad masses be sacrificed merely over some vertex shader packet loss meter blah blah.

You lose nothing at all by ending the practice of closure without consent; you gain more meaningful and enthusiastic consent

You only gain more adherents and less timidity.

You lose nothing by ending the meaningless expansion of the word "resolved" – change it to "pending" and refrain from adding to the general nonsense around SL.

You lose nothing by moving the feature voter out of the JIRA – JIRAs are clunky, hard to understand and use, etc. and something more simple is needed.

In the spirit of cutting the crap, I'm in the process of adding sub-tasks and "relates to" links in the way I proposed a while back. Use or ignore to your heart's content.

Baloney. You're showing off yourself, playing the role of efficient busybody who is going around adding sub-tasks as if what other people are doing is so much hot air. But debates are important, and required in a democratic society. Sub-tasks take care of themselves when you have the proposal consensus and approval. It's hardly the issue.

The reason why this debate could end up having things like "non pasaran" in it because it's about power, and the arrogation of the power to close off ideas and content by a small group that imagines that only those skilled in programming can run this world, and not accept accountability for what they do, and not make what they do reasonable and rational. That's what it's all about, and trust me, this is a pretty big problem for the Metaverse, and not something that is trivial or frivolous.

There'd be no need to bandy around terms like non pasaran if you didn't have someone behaving as egregiously as Strife did, closing something down politically like the Magisterium, then twirling around 180 degree with a magisterial flourish and announcing that he is "for" it but as long as he can rewrite the preamble to remove the accountability issue.

Meanwhile, I think I should be judged on the effects of my actions rather than whatever you imagine are my intentions.

(This applies towards everyone else, too. Whether residents actually intend to abuse the equivocation of "resolved" is not even relevant to your suggestions. What is more relevant is the effects of the equivocation in the first place - that is, just the fact that people are getting the wrong impression from "resolved" than is meant, and getting offended as a result.)

The ability to compromise is something found in the greatest of statesmen; it's absence has been the undoing of nations and other such trifles.

You're introducing a false premise here which is that there is a "compromise" to be had that is somehow "reasonable". But there isn't any thing proposed as a compromise in the mechanics of the proposal itself, in the operational paragraphs.

It's only the preamble you don't like, because it frames the problems in ways that implicate your actions. It's a generic preamble, however, meant to create due process against a small group of coders who constantly, and with great prejudice and subjectivity based on their own agenda and interests, close/resolve/pressure/intimidate the proposals of others. This is a generic problem that happens when any group imagines it is more enlightened and the rest and has the blessings from some greater power.

Great statesmen are not illegitimate overlords trying to wrest conformity to a small group. They are great statesmen precisely because they are legitimate, democratic, accountable, and able to deal with unaccountable powers at times in the interest of the people, or even defend a minority position against the people's illiberal tendencies for the greater good of the society. You're not doing that.

And if your point is to somehow play a school-marm's game of trying to berate a child by inciting them to an imagined greater version of themselves, you're not calling on me to be a great statesman, either. You're calling me to take what is right and proper – the diagnosis of the central problem of the JIRA – out of the proposal.

Celierra set up this false premise by imagining that her sub-tasks somehow address the JIRA itself. They don't. The problem isn't that votes are stopped during items marked "resolved" the problem is a) people are precipitously closing issues they don't like for the wrong reasons b) the word resolved has lost its meaning. It's the word that needs to be changed, and the behaviour deterred, not the votes that need preserving by the wrongfulness of the behaviour and the twisting of the meaning of the word continue apace.

People who make bad moves that are demonstrably false often complain about others "second guessing their intentions". But...this is a demonstrably false move. The votes wouldn't be stopped if consent were implemented. Votes wouldn't stop if they were marked not a meaningless "resolved" which closes them, but merely "motion to close" or "pending". So separating the tiny mechanical function of votes closing obliterates the larger context of bad actions.

The effects of the equovocation are merely the effects; we must get at the heart of the matter and remove the equovation itself. The Lindens have already taken great strides on this matter by confessing that "fixed internally resolved" was not accurate and was misleading. They now mark it differently and have explained so on the blog, I believe it now says "pending". So a leaf must be taken from their book and extended everywhere where "resolved" is false and misleading.

The idea that you can chop proposals up into tiny mechanical functionings can sometimes have its place, but here, it has been used in bad faith, or to worse ends. Example: we urge the "update" function to be restored as it was on the classifieds to stop the zeroing out of metrics. The Lindens, rather than undoing Gigs "fix" that added a cumbersome "save changes," can't put it back the way it was for some reason, so they isolate what they think is the sub-problem and jam the metrics to stay unerasable always, which then defies the other functions of updating location of the ads. Isolating into little sub-mechanical tasks can often lead to breaking the larger concept worse than it was to start with; indeed, isn't that the Story of Second Life?

There isn't any compromise to be had here on anything that is essential. If Strife or Celierra are somehow ruffled by the diagnosis of the problem and the characterization of the issue of consent, why, they are welcome to start a new proposal. That simply will call their bluff. If they can't start that new proposal, then I'll do so myself, meanwhile refusing to close this one, since the diagnosis is very much part of the problem and its solution : )

It's especially important to stick to this stark diagnosis because otherwise, the mechanics of the proposal begin to fracture and dissipate. The very first thing Strife does then, along with others, is to say, "Well, the real problem isn't consent, it's the people's incompetence, so let's assume that what really needs to be done is to give them a motion to close, 30 days to think and come up with it, but then final closure if they do a bad job because we say so." That could easily happen if the diagnosis is stripped away.

Further discussion here:
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/01/great-statesman.html

This provides ample evidence of my point. All that was changed wasn't the substance of the proposal, but its preamble, to water it down and make it seem like closure is a generic problem like the weather, and to imply that it's really more about resident incompetence in making their cases (that's why diagnoses are good; it's like the doctor saying, "Smoking is likely to cause lung cancer and you need to quit," and the patient saying, "I only smoke a half a pack a day and you're merely trying to scare me, you're the problem."

Tigro is willing to take of his vote because already, the weakened preamble then in Strife's version pushes him toward undoing the heart of the proposal. It merely becomes a proposal to give a 30-day grace period to the Magisterium's closures, with the hapless resident now pressured to make his arguments "better," where he then meets final closure, instead of what it was intended to be: a curb on the Magisterium's powers to close, so that they cannot close without consent. That will force them to make argumentation for closure that has to be demonstrably crystal-clear and reasonable. If that doesn't work on somebody (and it will work on most people if the Magisterium is as smart and reasonable as they claim), then they still get to be content with their consent. Why? Because protection of minority opinion, even wrongheaded incorrect minority opinion, is vital in a democratic society. In a scientific project, it's absolutely imperative to have the freedom to declare past received wisdom invalid on the basis of field testing and experimentation, without which scientific progress wouldn't be made.

I think you missed a few other things I did, other than making the sub-tasks.

I've already proposed changing "Resolved" to something else before (WEB-247). Torley's previously said that the Lindens wouldn't do it, for various reasons. I have reopened that issue, to see if anything should be done at this point with what we know now.

WEB-335 (I think) would do what you want regarding informing the original reporter automatically when his issues are resolved.

I linked those here as related issues. The reason I didn't make them sub-tasks is because WEB-247 is already a sub-task of something else and WEB-335 is already an issue of its own right.

[added in edit] As I said before, I think the sum of all these (the two sub-tasks and the two related issues) do everything you want. You say something in your blog post about wanting us to open a new issue minus your commentary, to prove something. But we already have these other issues, which don't currently have any commentary that could be offensive (for the most part). But if you'd like, I suppose that can be done. shrug

I'm well aware of Web 247 and related discussions. But unlike you, Torley's claim that "the Lindens won't do this" means nothing to me. It's immaterial. Let her think that. Let them all think that. We're here to exercise our imagination on our world. They changed their own internal policy about the "fixed/pending" stuff, did they not? Well, then, they're capable of changing this to a more normal position. After all, "resolved" on the website doesn't mean "sending it back to the drawing board" or "won't finish". It means well and truly fixed and done. When they say log-on problems are "resolved," you can log in again. So I'm sorry, but this flakiness around the world "resolved" here is utterly unjustified. It's like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland saying a word means something because she says it does.

And Celierra, you've got to really get the blinkers off deciding what you think is related or "best" for me.

This proposal isn't at all about merely informing the author that his issue was marked "resolved". That would be completely contrary to this proposal's spirit.

And it would also be completely unnecessary. Some time ago, user suggestions to be informed on any action on your proposal, a comment, etc. was already put in. I know that my mail box is filled with JIRA clutter informing me constantly of comments. Now, I suppose someone could close the action and not put a comment, and maybe the thing is set up so that mere actions like closures/resolutions don't generate comments. I don't know the specifics.

But generating a "fix" that then does generate notifications of closures is merely a tiny little technical fix. It's not at all about this proposal, and in fact will lead – again – away from actual execution of the proposal, because then the naysayers can easily say, well, we've made it so the person is given a heads up, and if he doesn't get his ass online to reopen his issue, that's his funeral. I'm sorry, but that's not good enough; it's not consent. Notification isn't sufficient, because it leads the user to having to come mount a battle for undoing the closure against hostily and pressure. I really hate seeing all these grown men and women on here, some of them highly skilled coders in fact, bowing and scraping and grovelling when their peers, some of them still wet behind the ears, pressuring to close things, or making them feel so bad that they begin to cook up excuses to themselves and "the community" for why they really can close it. It's like watching a Soviet or Chinese self-criticism session. Ugh.

The sum of your little technical hinges are not this door, they don't even open the door because the handle is being removed.

What you fail to realize that my proposal, stripped of the preamble, watered down, and pushed into the direction of blaming the user – Strife's reworkign – is NOT what is up. You only cite a) notification b) problematic use of the word resolve. But I'm talking about CONSENT. CONSENT. So in fact let Strife put up his wording of the proposal as a free-standing proposal if indeed he really has no objection to it. That should call his bluff.

If you really feel your ideas are superior please revert all my edits, I won't stop you. If I am to produce a counter proposal I would like to be able to reuse some of what I have already written. If the two proposals had the same wording people would have trouble telling them apart and get confused.

There is no demonstrable default that all people who resist closure, or become the targets of closure, are incompetent. Might I suggest it could be due to your incompetence in being able to participate in social collaboration productively? We are all adults here with literacy, education, disposable time, if not income, DSL lines, high-end computers, and the ability to operate Second Life, which isn't exactly the Sims Online, you know? We are people who found our way to this jungle of idiocy here at the JIRA and have managed to work the levers. Oh, to be sure, people don't always 'get" how the intricacies of the JIRA work, or they just type "My game don't work fix it" sometimes. So? Those few cases are closeable, and their proposers will not likely object to the closure.

But you know full well that there are prejudicial closures – including this very proposal here and many others I've made, and other land dealers have made.

I'm not incompetent, that's for sure. You just don't like my proposal – which is of course, your right, but you don't get to close it without my consent.

Both parties have not demonstrably shown anything of the kind that you imagine. In fact, from what I can see, quite a few of the closures made by over-eager coders fall into the "stupid" category. A good example was even the highly-recognized competent coder Nicholaz Beresford being browbeaten into closing a proposal to make clothes wear on an avatar with one click – something that would have benefited newbies enormously.

There is no reason on earth, for example, to close a proposal to make land less than 512 m2 not sell – it's merely a proposal, and valid one. Or a proposal to say "Make ad farms a TOS violation," which some busybody closed immediately as something "the Lindens say they can't do" – as if in fact the Lindens said it here – which they didn't – and as if the Lindens don't review policy – which they do! The smarmy stupidity blatantly evident in these kinds of fussy closures needs no further comment.

As I've said over and over again, if your "competency" is unimpeachable cough, Strife, then what are you afraid of? If your closures are all valid, why, reasonable people will instantly see your valid argumentations and bow to your, uh, superior judgement. If not, well, you just might be forced to become more accountable for what you do – certainly more accountable than you were on the forums! – and actually make arguments that are valid, that don't amount to "I'm a fanboy and I can read the Lindens' mind faster than they can."

Your changes in fact are even more diabolical than you initially indicated. I've said that the author must say NO to a closure, and if he doesn't say it, or make some other action like "I'm getting more information on this," then it should not close. It should only default to closure if he takes no action whatsoever. You are saying the same thing, falsely declaring my version as "discrimination," and packaging it with political spin describing it as "balance" against "the incompetence of users".

My proposal says "no," and explains why we need "no" – overactive and arrogant coders. Your proposal says "no," and explains why we need "no" – only as a putative balance against coders, but not to be really enforced as people are incompetent.

The public does not need to be guarded against the incompetence of users; users are the public and their incompetence is already heavily, heavily filtered out by the complexity and nastiness of the JIRA in general. But the public does need guarding against the incompetence of overactive coders because they kill science; they kill open debate, feedback, progress – real progress on bugs and features. These coders also tend to represent their class interests to see features and bugs tilt their way to their exotic software fantasies instead of more prosaic use by business and socializers.

I already reverted your edits, big guy. Uh, thanks for not stopping me. I already said that you should take the exact same wording you already put that I reverted, readily available in the "history". If you won't do it, I will.

You're concerned that people will have trouble telling them apart? Uh, well, incompetents that they are, yeah, they may not see why diagnosis of the problem – the actual fact of a group of coders closing proposals – is now substituted with diagnosis of a perception – that people can't make their cases well enough to satisfy the arrogant coders, and hopefully will yield in 30 days. So sure, they may not see the difference – uh, if the mechanics of the proposal in fact aren't twisted.

Again, just for those watching at home, these involve:

o the right of the author of any feature proposal or bug report to have CONSENT for all actions involving closure/resolution that shut off votes, in the form of a toggle
o the toggle comes in the form of an e-mail notification in which he is warned that a motion to close his proposal has been made by X Y resident, and that he has 30 days to take action to consent yes, to close the action, or say no, and explain his reasons or make edits to his proposal.
o this right to expire after 30 days of no action
o in the event the author presses NO that he does NOT CONSENT, the action to close/resolve is not completed.
o no votes are frozen or not tabulated during the motion to close and during the 30 day period
o in the event that it is mechanically impossible to code such a permission switch into the software, I propose reverting to the stock form of the software in which only authors can close their own proposals, and presumably Lindens, as the program's administrators.
o thus the small group of coders can busy themselves going around hectoring people to close their proposals, but people are free to listen or not. The coders can then send appeals to Lindens to make the closure. The Lindens can let these pile up and act on those that seem most urgent
o alternatively, a weaker version and not really acceptable, motions to close which are not responded to by the author within 30 days automatically go to Lindens for final review.

Does this create a much-feared clutter problem? No, because most people, if they bother with the JIRA at all, already get notices of comments on their JIRAS, and come in, and read them, and often close or change their JIRAS anyway.

Does this stop the "good citizens" from doing their "good work" of cleaning up the JIRA? No. They are welcome to make motions to their little hearts' content, but they will face some obstacles – and that's a good thing.

For one, these "good citizens" need to stop bustling around everybody else's proposals, and identify those that their little group wants to achieve, and work on refining those themselves, and fixing any bugs declared. They need to keep their paws off other people's proposals they don't like, and let those who made them, and their supporters and interlocutors, work to debate, refine, and push or close them.

What's gotten completely out of balance here is that the people who do bug hunting so zealously and often so pompously have been enabled to allow that function "as is" to bleed into feature discussions. They have set themselves up as arbiters of what they think should be a feature, or what the Lindens will or won't do, although they have no legitimacy in doing so. They operate invoking that hoary old chesnut of geek prejudices about users who suffer from "feature creep" or "are incompetent" or "have a rising tide of expectations".

I'm afraid I'm not familiar with your "blinkers in eyes" allusion.

I still don't see the "consent" difference between what you want and what I spelled out - I think you would need consent (or 30 days without response) with what I proposed. There's already consent built in something that appears in the e-mail as
>Status [changed to]: Pending
>Resolution: Can't Repro
...and the "close/reopen" buttons function just as well as "yes/no". I'm not sure what else you want to do.

Blinkers are what riders put on horses so that they aren't distracted, so that the horses only see in front of them. Unfortunately, you have a default blinker on: that other people are stupid, untechnical, can't understand, miss things, are clueless. But as usual, it's a case of not agreeing with your assessments and you have to make that distinction.

I'm not sure what your point is about consent, but I don't believe that "close/open" buttons are a sufficient device to express "consent". I would rather have a separate toggle that is "yes/no" *to the action proposed of closure".

What happens when you leave "consent" to flounder, and force the victim of a closure to go back and re-open his proposal, is that he has to do that in the face of hostile pressure, and even malicious comments. That should not have to be the case – he should be able to flip "yes/no" and that's it on the issue of closure and not be forced to completely re-open the proposal. It makes for a constant pulling of the blanket back and forth when you have this opening/closing/re-opening of issues (like this very JIRA). Not everyone will undertake re-opening – over and over again! – in the face of prejudicial closure. Meanwhile, a one-time toggle of NO to indicate lack of consent to closure sticks and doesn't remove, forcing the hostile closer to have to justify his flipping of a "close" motion again. I'm all for forcing people who close issues to do the explaining and accountability, rather than facing hapless closed victims to constantly have to try to justify their proposals in the face of a prejudicial small group.

Alyx, there's no "petty squabbling" going on here. That's just a technique of yours, as a member of the small group, to try to discredit your opponents, and then steamroller them with "technical solutions".

Strife is making a false claim with his pious calls for "balance," when, he, too, has steamrollered over the essential point: that there is a small group of coders and they do think they know best, and the broader public is ignorant and incompetent. And that's a huge problem, given that we are dealing not even with vetted, paid, accountable programmers in a transparent company called "Linden Lab," but dealing with anonymous, young, inexperienced, and often ignorant coders zealously assuming functions on a volunteer basis.

Strife is merely trying to force a false moral equivalancy, but clearly prejudicial to saying that proposers are incompetent (that many of the proposals come from the ranks even of his fellow coders in this small groups, and they face hostile closures, too, is lost on him).

The problem is the group dynamics. Second Life can't be a representative democracy, we're told. But there's no reason why its narrow class of rulers cannot be democratic in their procedures, and accountable to the rule of law, and to some notion of open scientific inquiry that often seems to be missing here. There's also no reason why this narrow class of rulers should confer legitimacy on a small group of likeminded coders without having some kind of performance demands and some kind of checks and balances.

Strife isn't saying "no one is infallible" but is cleverly trying to make another point: that there is no group of arrogant coders, and that he can whitewash that fact by making a blanket, bland statement, "Ah, we're all human and infallible."

If it weren't for arrogant coders trying to obliterate the fact of their existence, no arrogant dissidents would have to appear to keep hammering this point home : )

The idea that saying "no" to people who are in a small group constantly saying "no" someone amounts to "only Prokofy saying no" and "these other people being positive' is one of those halls of mirrors that people go down on forums like this where they lose touch with the simple reality of the situation, which is, is again:

a small group of coders close proposals they don't like.

Again, Alyx, what your small group of coder offers – your small group of coders – isn't "compromise" or "community". That's fake. They offer a) a false equivalence of themselves as "the community" and everyone else as "the incompetent" and b) a false compromise that lets them off the hook and enables them to reiterate "everyone else is incompetent".

Sorry, but in the face of common sense, I'm not persuaded that somebody suggesting that a TOS rule be put in against ad-farms (gosh, they could be for banks and casinos!), or somebody suggesting that there should be one-click avatar dressing (Nicholasz!) is "incompetent". Proposals like these need to live and thrive and gather votes, and the fanboyz need to keep their paws off them.

You said that I think "'resolve' is something that should remain as is without legitimate meaning". I've actually eliminated the word entirely and replaced it with your "Pending". Okay, I assumed that "Pending" means "closure pending agreement by reporter (or when 30 days have passed)". Is this not what you meant?

I guess I don't see the difference between clicking "reopen" and clicking "no, I don't agree to closing this". Reopening something isn't (or, at least, shouldn't be) a big deal.

I'm sorry... but that would be a rather unworkable solution. As people would be able to just start using alt accounts to lock open their items on the JIRA.

Not even the President has the ability to "veto" a bill in that manner.

The fact of the matter is, that this whole proposal is a platform for you to insult people who have an occupation you have some issue with. That being "coders". It doesn't matter who the person is, the fact that they disagree with you immediatly makes them a member of the self appointed elite coders who don't know anything or belong to any community.

This proposal died over a month ago, I encourage those people who found merit with items brought up here to create new proposals that will hopefully not inherit the same emotional baggage that this one has. If for some reason you feel this proposal can be rescued from the quagmire it has already descended into. I wish you the best of luck.

When somebody shuts down a proposal like "there ought to be a TOS against ad farms" or "nothing should be cut below 512 m2" there can't be a "pending". Because either you say "Yes, we'll do this and find a way" or "No". It's not as if the person has to "come up with more information". They might have to come up with more arguments to get you to care about land values, which you may not care about, but that's political debate, not technical reasoning. And no fair saying "but the Lindens say they won't do that". Lindens used to say they wouldn't close banks, either. They can when they wish.

"Pending" is a false statement about something to which someone has objected on ideological grounds. In fact, that's why feature voting doesn't belong in a bug tracker. But of course bug tracking is as political as the day is long, too.

Thraxis, your past contributions to the JIRA and my blog have long let me know that you aren't a sincere and worthy interlocutor. I'm not making this proposal as some kind of slam against coders; coders are needed to make the world. They can't run the world exclusively, however. This is an important, legitimate, and needed battle to fight, and it's not personal, and it's not about insulting "good citizens". It's about fairness and justice for all who use this platform.

"Nothing about us/without us!".

The invocation of alts as a problem isn't a legitimate debate element. Alts are the bane of SL. So? Anything in the JIRA is rendered illegitimate by alts. Why isn't a vote "yes" rendered illegitimate, but only my toggle "no"? That's pretty silly. WarKirby goes and votes on proposals with both of his "WarKirby" alts – not even very cleverly disguised? That doesn't seem kosher to me.

This proposal didn't die, or you'd feel no need to go on killing it : )

It's a simple proposal with simple mechanics that don't need parsing into tiny nuts and bolts that in fact disable it. You vote yes, or you don't, or you make a new one.

if left alone by the junta the jira works for defects. provided of course the person entering the defect is qualified to do so. meaning they understand jira, understand software defect identification and documentation, and the standard practices and process for software defect resolution in general. i have entered defects, documented them properly, and the entries have followed along the path to resolution without all this bickering and without a single vote. this is because these were defects and the supporting documentation provided enough information for the LL team to repro and process the defect accordingly. as such when used properly by qualified people the jira can be used effectively.

add in unqualified people who like to exercise some weird power thing and argue and jira is useless. therefore a flat rule can be applied. anyone not an employee of LL found to be closing other's jira entries should simply be denied access to jira (and LL forums) permanently. case closed matter resolved. if you do not understand SQA stay out of the way and leave the work of others alone.

this alt thing is amusing too. anyone using alts to increase votes should be barred from secondlife for life for fraudulent and deceptive behavior as it is a trademark of a criminal mind at work.

an enforced policy is the best solution here. jira works fine if it is used correctly by adults.

Prokofy may have been around forever, but I do not think that her status as an early user, writer, publisher, and land baron should influence how her Jira issues are handled. I'm resentful, frankly. Any other user's Jira with this little support could have been closed long since, with little stir.

I would love to see a rationale from a Linden as to why this issue has been given such special handling.

Somewhere up there, someone was making the mistake of thinking this JIRA is the place where LL handle bugs and code patches. AFAIK. It ain't. Items get imported from here to the hallowed private sanctity of the internal JIRA. So trying to shoot this JIRA down as a bad software management tool is misinformed. It isn't. It's a platform for users to provide bug input to LL.

And for the record. I think this issue needs closing by now as well. [Ooops? Did I feed the T word?]

Nika, um, calm down, nobody is being given any special treatment here, you're hallucinating. It's just that I'm not going to allow the little cabal to get special treatment and close other people's issues they don't wish to be closed, and find worthy of keeping open. If you're concerned about any special treatment around here, you need to turn your fine sense of justice and fair play on those who keep closing this and other proposals just because they think they know better.

Why should they get to do that? They haven't cited any compelling reason why this perfectly ordinary and needed feature request, which – may I repeat – was originally defaulted into the tools themselves (!!!), should be eliminated.

If you don't like something, Nika, don't let it harm your eyeballs, move on, work on the proposals you do like, don't keep fluttering around and agitating to close something you don't like. You aren't in charge of the Conformity Committee here. Let it go.

It never ceases to amaze me that anyone who stands up to the gross favouritism shown to these small groups of coders over and over again – on forums, inworld, at office hours, on the JIRA, is himself then falsely accused of operating from some position of favouritism or enabling of favouritism just for himself. It's truly a hall of mirrors, this JIRA.

The proposal is a plain one: a toggle for consent, to stop this silly dysfunctional pattern that a small group has gotten into where they busy themselves going around and browbeating people to close their proposals if they don't like them, or actually close them. Bug off. Go find a bug, work that, leave this feature alone.

Just because a proposal only has nine votes doesn't mean it is a candidate for closure. My God, its votes have been repeatedly froze as it was hacked at and slashed and closed, and had to be reopened again. There's no law of the JIRA that says "get X number of votes or be closed" or "find favour with the cabal or be closed". Just move on to other things you find useful. Use your filters and don't look at the items that remain open if they throw you into a seizure of clutchiness about their openness.

Fluf, if this isn't a platform for provide much-needed feedback for the proprietary software coders of Second Life, then why on earth and in cyberspace are you busying yourself pressuring me to close this proposal, and the other one about the sale of property less than 512 for $0? Are you daft? If something isn't to your liking, leave it alone. Either it will gather votes, or it won't. If it doesn't, geez, not exactly any fear here that the Lindens will actually put it into effect, eh? So what are you afraid of?

Prokofy, you have 9 people with you. YOURS is the little cabal, the bulk of this community simply does not agree with you. Truth hurts, but at least in this circumstance it is simple to see.

"If you don't like something, Nika, don't let it harm your eyeballs, move on, work on the proposals you do like, don't keep fluttering around and agitating to close something you don't like. "

I am not agitating to close this because I don't like it – note that I have never bothered to close it. I am saying that the community is showing broad disinterest, and that the level of rancor expended in your attempt to inflate its importance is disturbing. This issue should be closed to cut off discussion, as any issue of similar disinterest would naturally have been by this time, particularly one that is spreading useless negativity in a previously collaborative, largely drama-free, venue.

"It never ceases to amaze me that anyone who stands up to the gross favouritism shown to these small groups of coders over and over again – on forums, inworld, at office hours, on the JIRA, is himself then falsely accused of operating from some position of favouritism or enabling of favouritism just for himself. "

Prokofy, I think you underestimate your own influence ... perhaps. You attend MANY Linden office hours, and speak persuasively and insistently at them. With your own media outlets and considerable skills in suasion, you are a gadfly of monstrous proportions. None of the others participating in these fora have anywhere near the bully pulpit you do. Therefore, to claim that the worker bees on the Jira are shown favoritism is absurd. LL's senior management all know you – how many of the Jira's proletariat can make that claim?

Next time you make a list of the FIC, put your name at the top. To suggest that any set of technical types have influence greater than yours is ... frankly ... laughable.

I will await your response on your blog, if you care to make one ... this is rapidly degenerating into a private discussion, for which I apologize to the good readers of this thread.

For the record I am not closing this because of some vendetta against Prok or because some FIC ordered it although I hold my opinions about Prok and the FIC so don't even begin to accuse me of that.

I'm re-opening it because there really is no good argumentation against a feature that in fact is the default of the very original form of the software ROFL.

I don't have any alts on the JIRA, nor any "cronies".

People who don't disagree with an idea often find defense of it "useless negativity". They're the uselessly negative, preventing due process and fairness from being established. There's nothing especially "collaborative" about this JIRA, filled with back-biting and sniping in numerous threads in which I'm not even involved, as anyone can see, as the people in the small group are the unkindest of all to each other.

I fail to see why anyone with "gadfly status" is somehow deprived of the ability to come on and make proposals – and keep them open! – like anyone else. The worker bees of the JIRA fee they have sanction from Lindens to go around closing people's proposals. They don't. The Lindens wanted them to be helpful, not oppressive.

No, I'm hardly in any "FIC" if I don't get to go around closing JIRAs – and having people in charge applaud tacitly.

There's nothing "private about this discussion. It's an open book. It's a simple proposal. If you find that it gets in your way, examine your conscience.

Tigro, you are creating false problems here once again, to invoke the rights of a tiny group to lord it over everybody. Where are these griefers? Can you point to a single incident like that? Given that you have to log in here with a SL name, it limits somewhat the anonymous attack. Don't you think that a "noob" who is clueless will have difficulty even in using the JIRA, and that regrettably, that means there's a natural barrier of attrition to griefing? I say "regrettably" because it also means it is hellishly user unfriendly.

It's typical of the advocates of having governance run by a tiny cabal of "experts" with everyone else in their thrall and browbeaten by them that these security-state boosters will invoke the "horror" of the griefers and "terrorists" who will overflow the system if they don't clean up the JIRA.

That's just downright silly. It shows the fear always underlying the arrogance of those who rule with illegitimacy and without the consent of the governed. If the rationale for JIRA closures was that tremendously logical and wonderful thing that the small group seems to think, then what have they to fear? Everyone but a small few will go along with their wondrous logic. But as they are human and are some percent infallible, as even Strife can admit, there will be just that one check on other rational and logical people differing with their logic.

I can hardly imagine that someone stupid enough to grief the JIRA with a flood of nuisance proposals will be able to stay around for 30 days to keep trying to keep them open – newbie attacks like that from day-old accounts usually don't repeat. There's all kinds of things one can do to prevent that, i.e. having only payment-on-file post to the JIRA or having to wait 30 days but I'm not for limiting JIRA participation in that way.

I think you cannot build an entire system of collaboration around the fear of griefing as if it were the norm. You can't point to any such example. Indeed, they hysterics here worry that a JIRA like this very one open for a mere 2 months and having to be reopened 6 times is some kind of horrible national emergency.

Use search, use filters, and stay focused on what you wish to accomplish, Tigro, and don't fret so about other people's open JIRAs that feel like loose ends needing tying off. Apply that energy to correct and finish to your own work.

The entire system is "the JIRA". Individual items like WEB-382 are "issues". "The JIRA" is the place to post "issues". WEB-382 or any other proposal is not "a JIRA".

/me chuckles ... :-P

I can call this system whatever I find useful to call it. There isn't some prescibed rule that the Vatican or the White House or the Kremlin has passed down telling everyone what it must be called.

People who fancy themselves "in the know" and "in the little cabal of coders" l ike to call it "issues". And...let me clue you in on something you may not be aware of – these cognoscenti will tell you never to call it "the JIRA," like some country bumpkin, but to call it simply "JIRA" like "school" or "Brooklyn". You don't say "I'm going to the school today" or "I'm going to the Brooklyn," but you do say "I'm going in the hospital" or "I'm going to the Bronx."

Get it? So you're actually out of touch yourself with the inner core here. And as for calling something "an issue" instead of 'My JIRA", I can do that too. WEB-382 is "a JIRA" to me, as it is one of the things put on THE JIRA, see? Usage evolves naturally as people use something. All you're trying to do is pull rank, and insist usage flow your way, but as I'm explaining, you're actually not as cool as some of the most cool people who have long since witheringly explained to us that it isn't "the JIRA".

Fluf, I imagine that a relatively small, but important, group of users will be affected by this proposal such that when a motion to close their proposal is made, they won't buckle under peer pressure – or logic (if there is any to be had) but will stick to their lasts.

It's hardly creating any miniscule problem, however,

Chuckle away, but you're failing to understand due process. I often find this an elusive concept for coders who think everything should be done by no/yes or black/white code and not sound judgement.

A proposal that deals with the overwhelming majority of land griefing sign extortionists, but leaves some hapless tiny number of people on your sim without a 'safe" way to turn over to you $500 16 m2 is indeed a proposal that has dealt with a problem, and left a tiny minority to solve by other means. That's a proposal tackling a specific menace: land-farming.

A proposal like this one that creates a process that is generic to any proposal is one that affects the whole system. It's important to protect minorities, as I explained on the other proposal. Your chortling and finding some "hypocrisy" and "gotcha" here is hilarious in itself, because you aren't able to grasp the differences in kinds of proposals, between due process, and specific problems.

Is it important to protect what you imagine will be a tiny minority of people who "won't see reason" or "refuse to buckle under peer pressure"? Yes, because they may have the best ideas – you never know. They may come up with a solution others are blind to – you never know. They might be right – you never know.

Whereas the tiny handful of people on your sim you imagine can't live without being able to sell their 16 m2 for anything but $0 are people not representing a possible solution to a problem; they represent the people for whom the problem's solution couldn't work for their unique and rare circumstances. There are other things they can do – get an escrow service, sell for $0, move, do nothing.

Their hobbling of the solution of the entire problem – let's say 90 percent of the people whose ad extortion would disappear – is not fair or just. You can solve the 90 percent, and find ways to remedy the 10 percent if they don't play trolls.

The problem of due process and a mechanism to prevent bullying on the JIRA is of a different order, and protecting the minority to be able to say "no" to busybodies closing JIRAs may, indeed, save the JIRA from itself.

I expect this response will be pitched over your head.

also, how can it be a minory if everyone has the power to close AND reopen any issue?

/me still chuckles

Hey wait?! Did someone up there mention trolls?

And Tigro .. Spot on! Well put!

Tigro, duplicates are readily determined. That's not at issue. People who are creative need to create new proposals and refine old ones, not close them. Closing is death, not creativity. At best, it's janitorial work. At worst, it's prejudicial harassment of ideas people don't like.

If they "need" to be closed, then the logic will be eminently visible to the original poster, he gets a notice, and within 30 days, if he doesn't take action, it will wither and die away like the state under communism : )

A person who refuses to close an issue that "everybody" (read, a small group of janitors) wishes to close – and they can make 9 people seem like a mob – can be in a minority. And that's ok. Because woe and betide ye, I have seen verily a Linden act upon a proposal with only 3 votes on it from me, do it, deliver it (or at least claim it's going to be delivered, which is as good as it gets ) – and it has no "popularity". Voting doesn't equal doable, as we see from the more-than-25 groups proposal.

The point of granting CONSENT is to stop scenes where there is constantly tugging back and forth numerous times. If you can't close an action automatically, but it requires consent, it creates a break on your excessiver powers to close off someone's creativity.

Indeed in any collaborative database, website, or document tracking system I've ever worked on, the original author consents to edits – period. That' show it is in the civilized world.

There's a kind of sport that has crept into the JIRA, which is the closing of entries. People feel like when they've closed somebody else, they've accomplished something. Not only does it give them a heady sense of power, they get to feel as if they've actually done something. Eliminated a dupe, or knocked down a cluttery idea.

This is hugely illusory, however, because closing, mopping up, eliminating dupes – this is janitorial work.

I've laid out the explanation nicely about why generic proposals about due process for the system differ from specific proposals to address one ill in the system. If that eludes you, I can't help.

The "statistics" shown about the supposed "non minority" in the case of under-512 parcels are made up of monkey-math, extrapolated from one sim, with a fallacious argument thrown into boot that multiplicity of owners in a majoritarian formula ("all ad farmers with 16 m2 and 64 m2 or 68 percent" can somehow legitimately trump the land-holders who are actually using their land for living or business ("22 percent"). That's pretty transparently fraudulent.

Whatever, lady.

"The "statistics" shown about the supposed "non minority" in the case of under-512 parcels are made up of monkey-math, extrapolated from one sim, with a fallacious argument thrown into boot that multiplicity of owners in a majoritarian formula ("all ad farmers with 16 m2 and 64 m2 or 68 percent" can somehow legitimately trump the land-holders who are actually using their land for living or business ("22 percent"). That's pretty transparently fraudulent. "

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I didn't use "monkey math" (whatever that is). I simply counted the parcels and sizes on the region I happen to have land in. Essentially a random region of mainland. I could have bought anywhere all those months ago, but that's where I landed.

I'm not sure your using "majoritarian" in it's proper context there. Hmmm.

I never tried to claim a particular group of sized parcels was ad-farmers either. I just stated numbers of parcel sizes. Quite a few 16m parcels are not actually ad-farms, but just overpriced land left behind in case someone buys them.

I don't recall quoting any of the percentages as 22% or 68%!!! And yet I stand accused of fraudulent behaviour!!!

And you are obviously reading the rest of the statistics I gave incorrectly as well. I was merely pointing out that a significant number of people would be effected rather than an insignificant minority.

This is pistols at dawn stuff! Gad I'll even take a rapier to you to defend mine honour! Devil be damned those that say you can't duel with a woman. Bahhhh!

Oh. Whoops. Off topic!

Edit: Untameable! I just saw your word count post in the mad scroll down. I take your words to heart, and will visit troll bridge no more. (Though actually, sometimes it is fun baiting them just to see the entry get so long that no-one will ever read it. Theoretically I mean. Not that I'd stoop that low!).

Fluf, I'm surprised you're not standing by your numbers now, as they were posted in the other proposal for all to see. This is a problem worse than monkey math, then. I've read them exactly as they were posted. Did you, uh, change them?

Majoritarianism is trying to offset these largely no-show rapacious extortionist ad-farmers as a "majority of land owners" on a sim with their mere 16 m2 parcels against legitimate land-owners with 512 or larger with homes or shops. In fact, one must engage in vigorous antidisestablishmenttarianism against this majoritarianism LOL. The concept of a majoritarian system says that "winner takes all". You can read about it even on your favourite Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majoritarianism. I've used it correctly here.

Parliamentary democracies try to find a balance between enabling the majority to exercise its will because it is the majority, and protecting minority rights. One of the way you protect minority rights is by enabling freedom of expression. Here in our very little, compromised context only faintly mirroring real parliamentary democracy, that would mean sustaining the right of individuals to exercise consent over the issue of the closing of their proposals. So if there is some legitimate interest of ad farmers as owners of a minority of squares on a sim, let's hear it. What would it be? The right to extort? But then, that's not a legitimate interest. The right to thrust ads in people's faces on residential sims, even if they don't extort a sale? But that's spam. Why is that not OK coming into my inbox (against the TOS), which I can erase easily, but ok on the land outside I have to stare at all day?

Your notion that the land remaining in your sim set to hugely high prices but without ads isn't part of the whole extortion scene is unsupportable. Normal good neighbours IM around asking if anybody wants their scraps, and sells them for normal prices. Even some of the land botters do that for you. So I find it implausible that it's necessary to leave these tiny parcels on a sim set out for sale for ridiculous prices unless you WANT SOMEBODY TO BUY BACK THEIR VIEW AND SECURITY AGAINST BLIGHT.

Why is this worth bothering with, persistently? That's not trolling, it's merely bothering to stand by a point, persistently ("trolling" is one of those MMORPG culture hangovers that we need to dissipate in the more mature VW context).

After all, this isn't just the insignificant P-JIRA that the Lindens only have half an eye on as their own internal JIRA is where it "really" happens. This is the prototype for the whole Metaverse. Hopefully other worlds will scrap it entirely, or at least separate features and bugs (related, but requiring different processes). Still, just in case they don't (and the love of JIRA type stuff is all over the map), we need to work on this, here and now.

Prokofy Neva is a male avatar, I'm male in Second Life, and I'd thank you to be respectful of that.

How much would it cost to buy back our Jira and secure it against your blight?

But for similar reasons, Prokofy, I refuse to subscribe to your idea that Thraxis was attempting to slander you above. (I can say nothing about any prior experiences you may have had.) You seem to think that "common sense" would conclude that Thraxis is malicious and nothing he says should be given weight. But that would be the same attitude that leads others to the same conclusion about you. A misunderstanding is, to me, a much more probable and satisfying explanation. I will not ascribe to hostility what is better explained by misunderstanding, mistake, or ignorance. And from my own experience, I find that declaring hostility does little if there really existed hostility, and creates hostility if none had existed before.

I don't know who declared who hostile first, but this has got to stop, at least here. Please. On all "sides".