Dear Jonathon

Posted Nov 21, 2004 19:15 UTC (Sun) by maney (subscriber, #12630)
Parent article: RFC: Proposed comment policy change

I'm addressing this to you because, to be honest, I haven't so much as skimmed more than a fraction of the comments in this thread, and so don't really feel as though I'm part of a discussion this time out. It's not quite the first time I've found a comment thread at LWN to be so worth passing by, but it's one of the outstanding examples of the breed from all the years since you added this feature to the site.

After all these years, and despite occasional highly valuable info that's come up in the discussion threads, it's LWN's journalism that keeps me coming back (and, now, keeps me renewing my subscription). So to a considerable extent I really don't care a hoot what you do with the discussion part - keep it, can it, open the floodgates to unregistered posters or close them to admit only subscribers. I'm not saying that these choices wouldn't influence my perusal of the discussions, but none of these policies would have any significant effect on the part of LWN that is most valuable to me.

That said, I would vote for the status quo - allow registered users to post, regardless of their subscription status. As long as the ratio of annoyingly inappropriate items is as low as it so far has been, it doesn't seem to me to be worth losing whatever fraction of the more valuable items non-subscribers are adding to the discussions. Perhaps it would be useful to add some indication of subscriber or non-subscriber, but then again this might do more ill than good. Still, the fact is that I really haven't a clue how much of what I like (and, from time to time, dislike) in the discussions is from subscribers or non-subscribers, which makes it impossible to weigh the pros and cons in any but the crudest way.

If you're itching to spend some time improving the site code <grin>, may I suggest that the mechanism that handles logging one in when one tries to read something that's subscriber-only on the day that the cookies have expired could use a little more intelligent behavior? As it is now, it seems not to have any memory of the URL you wanted to see, so after dredging up the password out of one's memory (after all, it was last used a month ago), one is dumped back at the home page rather than being shuffled along to the page one was headed for. It's a small annoyance, but one that bites me two dozen times a year, more or less. (I regularly read LWN from two different machines, so of course have to reauthenticate from each one every month).