Thank you for having said so, Karr 4.0. Alas, it's a very nice idea that can't be seen any more because ... what else ... this post of mine was censored, too - in this case, before it could get into the Internet Archive. I have no copy of it saved, myself, because the idea that a moderator would censor a post in which I did nothing more than explain why I would like to have this feature never occured to me. Why would somebody do that?

Oh, wait. I remember, now. Because Graham Perrin has repeatedly complained about the practice of having links open in new windows, as he does in this discussion. So really, it goes that far? We aren't even free to make feature requests that the in kids don't like, without some cowardly mod sneaking in and deleting our content, the moment we aren't looking. Diigo is so afraid of controversy, that even feature requests get censored.

Awesome. This company is special. Take a look at the rest of my posts from today, and you'll see what I mean. Incredible.

I rehashed some of the points raised in the opening post for this discussion which, as I've said, has since been censored, doing so in this post in this discussion, started by the ever censorious Mr. Perrin, with whom I had words.

I should point out the tone of my remarks has changed considerably. The original was a friendly explanation of my position. As I repeat some of my already censored arguments in my recent post, I'm angry and I let that anger show, because I should be angry. This wasn't just inexcusable. It was unforgivable. Somebody needs to be fired over this.

Graham Perrin wrote:

> If a new window is intended, it should be explicit before a link is followed.
>
> Workaround
>
> Use raw HTML when writing.

Simpler workaround - simpler for us, that is. Less so for Diigo's staff. Just have the system insert this code:

title="Link opens in a new window"

if this is the case. The little bubble with that message in it will pop up the moment that the visitor beings his cursor up to the link. Plus, have user settings override group and profile defaults when one is logged into Diigo - which I believe they already do.

I notice that Uservoice will not let me reply to your post, Perrin, so I'll repost those remarks here: http://feedback.diigo.com/forums/76211-ideas/suggestions/1067705-do-not-force-target-blank-it-disrespects- "Spoiling contexts and histories reduces the usefulness of Diigo as a knowledge management tool. Most users will not care about this type of thing but for people who *do* care, it *is* very important." And in your usual narcissistic way, Mr. Perrin, you ask those reading this to just assume that those who do care about the issue will feel the same way about it as you do, even though you, yourself already know this to be absolute nonsense. We've briefly discussed this subject in this discussion http://groups.diigo.com/group/Diigo_HQ/content/forcing-new-windows-disrespecting-user-preferences-the-target-blank-effect-959907 in which I've already given you a remedy to the non-issue you've been raising, and in this discussion http://groups.diigo.com/group/Diigo_HQ/content/feature-request-option-to-have-links-open-in-new-window-587245 in which I explained why giving in to you on this issue would create a real problem for a number of us, and in the long run, for the company as well. One might notice that my first post in that discussion has been censored, and as I've seen you call for censorship, before http://groups.diigo.com/group/Diigo_HQ/content/bookmarks-insist-on-being-private-against-my-will-959613#36 I think I can make a reasonable guess as to who wrongly flagged that remark. Pushy little fellow, aren't you? But let's take a look at why this idea that you've fixated on is such a terrible one ...

Having offsite links open in a new window in a page of website reviews - something that really is a good practice - means that the visitor can easily find his way back to the page and read more reviews, when he's done reading each review in turn. All that the reader needs to do is keep the old window open, and when he goes back to it, there he will be, right where he was before, ready to look at the next item in turn, if he so pleases. This represents effortless convenience for the average reader, whose attachment to the Internet is likely to be shaky, and who does have better things to do with his time than to learn how to become a "power user", and learn the quirks of this system or that. Now, let's take a look at the consequences of granting the whims of users like Mr. Perrin, whose argument, as you can see just by looking at his post, is that you should give him what he wants, just because he's been willing to make a scene about this, and go on making a scene about this over a period of years. The average reader will come to that link, and not only not knowing the difference between right and left clicking on a link, but not really wanting to know, will go through that link into the same window he was on, when looking at the menu of links, and what is likely to happen, next? Most pages we will link to will, themselves, have other links, which the reader will then follow, meaning that if he's doing so in the same window as the bookmark page was on, in order to get back he'll either have to backarrow his way back, watching each page he was at open sluggishly, as they tend to at such times, just to get back to where he was. Sites will often link to other sites, and curiosity can and will carry our readers quite far. Backarrowing through all of that, over and over, is going to get to be a real nuisance when it's possible at all, and in many cases, it won't be. After a certain number of backarrowings, the system usually forgets exactly where the previous site had been. End result: In exchange for appeasing our boy with the Napoleon complex, Diigo will be bleeding traffic. Visitors, on a continuing basic, will be failing to return to our pages and Diigo's site. Was Diigo hoping to monetarize itself, someday, probably by carrying advertising? If Diigo becomes a place where visitors linger for only seconds before not being seen again, because getting back to where one was is either too much work or not possible at all, then those ads aren't going to be worth anything to the advertisers, and potential advertisers are going to learn this, very quickly. At that point, say goodbye, not just to your ad revenue in the present, but to the possibility of ever earning such revenue, because your company will have squandered whatever trust those potential advertisers would have been willing to give, by offering them the chance to pay for a worthless opportunity. Nobody enjoys being hustled. As for the users ... a number of us have memberships on Webring, and I can assure you that despite the impression that the loudmouthed Mr. Perrin would leave, some of us very much do care about this, and would most strongly object to his wishes on this point being granted. Webring is rightly opposed to the creation of one way sites - sites that the visitor, having visited, will have trouble returning from - and having the links open in this way effectively turns our homepages into such sites, if we should integrate them with our pages on Diigo, at all. Some of us might even want to put our Diigo pages, themselves, on the Webring system - something that has been around and has been a notable presence on the Internet long before this odious and otherwise inconsequential little man who has nominated himself to be the king of Diigo first decided to blight our days with his presence. Granting him his wish eliminates that as a possibility. Perhaps, as a user, one might want to carry on a sort of extended discussion, making a microblog of one's favorite page, linking into this site here and that site there, as one makes one's points. One would be asked to accept that one was to lack the freedom to do so, because Mr. Perrin personally felt strongly about this, and decided that he had the right to decide for others how their pages would work. I assure you that despite any incredible lies Perrin will have told you to the contrary, that creative freedom is something that those whose work is worth reading will care about most intensely, and that they are not going to find this acceptable. And what does Perrin have by way of rebuttal, in this case? A willingness to play the broken record game, as he pretends that an opposition does not exist, and seeks to foster that illusion by asking that any arguments that he doesn't care for be deleted. That, and a willingness to throw a temper tantrum over the fact that the design of somebody else's page ignored HIS "strongly held preferences". The problem with Diigo is that this flimsy rationale will probably be reason enough, as appeasing crazy people like Perrin seems to be the main corporate strategy for this company. But it's no recipe for success.

In case anybody asks ... yes, I have contacted Diigo about this.

Thank you for taking care of that, Ms. Tsai. Since you are working on a new release of Diigo, I was wondering if you knew about the new Diigo features request group, started by KARR 4.0, located at

http://groups.diigo.com/groups/diigo-feature-requests-community

Perhaps this might be a useful source of input on the current release, and a source of ideas of things to work on in the new release?

And I find yet another post of mine that was censored before it had a chance to get into the Internet Archive. Something else I don't have a copy of, having never heard of such behavior. I've run into censorious mods before, but this is a level of arbitrariness and insanity I've never seen matched.

What is missing is post #1 in this discussion, in which I was talking about the spam problem. I wish I could remember exactly what I said, but I guess I'll never know, because this, too, was censored. "How can the spammers be dealt with, and I hope they don't ruin Diigo" - that was something your staff had to make certain wouldn't be seen in the future?! Are you people kidding me?

I'm moving past rage into slack jawed astonishment, at this point. Why would you want to squash a post like that? Is this some kind of childish power play, "look at me, I'm so important that I can act like a complete lunatic on the job, and still go back to work the next week"?

Yay.


To the staff and any other moderators on this board: Have you folks thought about going back on whatever medication you discontinued? There are a number of physicians in my family. Maybe one of them could prescribe you something, though I'm starting to think that what you might really need is to be enrolled in a clinical trial. I don't know that modern medicine is ready to deal with you. But then, who would be?

What do you know? Another censored post. What's interesting about this one is that there is absolutely no need to take my word for what it said, because this one made it into the Internet Archive before it was deleted. This gives us some idea of when the deed was done, because the Internet archive records dates. A January 23, 2010 copy of the discussion can be found at the list of archived copies of this discussion in the Internet archive still shows my September 21, 2009 post, meaning that somebody waited over three months to delete my post. As I said, waiting until most of us had stopped watching before tampering with the archives. Let's take a look at this post of mine which was so offensive, that it had to be taken out of the record, on the sly. Nothing has been changed except for the font and background color. "Could you tell me the group name and the one who will be the new owner?" Mr.Liu, you're kidding, right? This should be an easily accessible feature. I know of not a single site other than Diigo on which staff intervention is needed for a group to be transferred from an old owner to a new owner. This is completely unheard of, for reasons that this case makes obvious. I know that you're still in beta, but come on ... really ... A mere statement of incredulity, reasonably supported by ample experience, was enough to get somebody on the staff to engage in censorship, in a very sneaky way. People at Diigo: where's your integrity? Where did you get the idea that this was acceptable behavior? Yes, I'm still saving copies of this garbage, and will be inviting people to ask themselves just how much trust Diigo deserves, given that your staff has shown itself to be willing to resort to this sort of game playing.

That last one was post #4, as the missing number in the archive would suggest.

Graham Perrin wrote:

> .. > .. don't show up in the toolbar > > .. Let's continue the list/toolbar discussion under your other ...

One should know that Mr. Perrin has no official standing with Diigo, and that one is free to ignore his demands - oh, I do mean "suggestions" - despite the impression his imperious tone might have left.

That having been said, I would feel more than a little uncomfortable with the idea of this feature, because from my point of view, it looks like an accident waiting to happen. I happen to love the idea of my bookmarks appearing in reverse chronological order, because I'm in the process of making something like a blog out of them. I have this uncomfortable image of the screen moving slowly one day, my accidentally hitting the wrong button as a result - this has happened, in the past - and, all of a sudden, shredding my microblog by reshuffling its posts and destroying the context each gives to those near it, being left with no way to repair the damage than by slowly reordering the posts by hand.

If we could toggle between "alphabetical" and "reverse chronological" order, then I would feel less uncomfortable. I don't mind seeing you order your own bookmarks as you please - they're yours, and that's your business. I'd just hate to see the proposed feature turn into a boobytrap for some of the rest of us.

Ravn, in comment 17, went on being his psychotic self, which makes Joel Liu's remarks in comment 18 all the more memorable. Keep in mind the fact that, at this point, Ravn has announced his intention of committing a crime in response to my defense of Liu's employer. Cyberstalking isn't just obnoxious behavior, it is a legally defined offense in a number of jurisdictions. Let's take a look at what Greg says next.

Again, I'll soften the profanity, not out of any respect for Diigo at this point, but just because I don't want to give them an excuse to delete this post.

Lol. As soon as s**t gets lukewarm, you go from being on a first-name basis with me to addressing me formally like this is some sort of public trial. Trouble for you is, I'm not one of their users. I'm just on this website, f**king with you because you're a total p**z and you thought you could trade barbs with me in that ridiculous way you do it. I really don't care if they ban me from this little corner of the internets on account of your childish ramblings. I've already proven my point. It's your own d**n fault, and even if I go, everybody here is still gonna recognise how incredibly stupid you really are. And if you wanna keep whining about it, I can keep fucking with you long after they kick me off this spectacularly HTML-enabled forum. Really, everybody knows how glad you are that I decided to open up two freely available links on your Diigo profile page. (By the way, that's not "stalking," in the least. It's getting the last word, the right way. Which isn't to say that I couldn't, if you really want the word defined for you first-hand. You need to invest in a dictionary way more than I do. I own more than you've probably ever seen in your pathetic life.) Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to take the easy out of complaining to the administrators that I just won't leave you alone. Gee - seems like a problem you used to have, Ravine! Y'know, if you'd just come out and admit that you're a gigantic vulva who argues incessantly without fact-checking jack s**t, and that I've presented incontrovertible evidence that you've been wrong on every issue about which you've insulted my and everybody else's intelligence on this forum, I would feel less inclined to get my friends involved in making you recognise the error of your ways. But instead of just crying to Diigo mummy and daddy privately and not even letting me know about it, you had to continue to make a public spectacle of yourself like you've got something to prove to your precious readers. Rule #1 of keyboard warriorship: Never, ever make it more valuable for someone to ruin your day than it would be for them to prove their original point, ESPECIALLY when that point has already been proven, time, and time, and time again. Rule #2 is, never care more about your internet friends than the mission at hand. So, "Dunphy," I heard Delicious won't alphabetise for you. Is this true? Pissant.

As I've pointed out, he proved nothing, because he screenshotted nothing but a fragment of a page, as you can still see for yourself - the screenshots are still up and again, notice that he wasn't willing to let you see the whole page. But the mere fact that Ravn was a jerk who though that belligerence was an argument isn't what made this memorable, and worth commenting about, two years later. One runs into idiots like him every day, and seldom remembers their names for long.

The cowardly response of management is what makes this memorable. Let's take another look at what Liu said, immediately following these last two post, and note that his remarks are still up there:



"Hi Greg,

I agree it's better to add an alphabetical order in the list and we'd like to add it . I guess it will help you find bookmarks easily in a list. However, since you will have many bookmarks in "My bookmarks" page, it will be very hard to find bookmarks though alphabetical order, right?"



You did not misread that. Management's response to a report by a reasonable user reporting a threat of harassment - not an interpretation, but Ravn's own words - that came in response to said user's defense of management's company was to try to give the insane individual threatening him with harassment what he wanted. Then, as if that weren't bad enough, management waited until the news got a little old, went into the records, and selectively deleted portions of it that revealed what they had done.

No good deed goes unpunished. Liu and Diigo obviously have no idea of what the word "gratitude" means, a point I would soon take up with them. Actually, with Joel.

I'm looking through my records for the letter I sent, although, to be honest, at 12:45 am my time, I'm not sure of just how motivated I want to be, so I'll give you the reader's digest version of it from memory, and maybe repost the original elsewhere, when I find it, if there still seems to be any point to doing so.

I had already sent the staff a message reporting Ravn's behavior and citing the terms of the user agreement which he had breached before Joel showed up, and Joel replied by schmoozing with the offending party, who had grossly breached the TOS in both word and spirit in a way that would offend and outrage almost anybody who could function in the real world, while giving the silent treatment to and snubbing the person that the offending party who Ravn had just publicly announced, on Diigo's own board, that he was harassing, in this very discussion. The man's classism was a nice touch, if one really wants to call somebody who acts this way "a man". Remember what he said?

"I own more than you've probably ever seen in your pathetic life"

I was infuriated, and rightly so. I expressed my anger in a message to Liu, saying many of the same things you've seen me say here (in different words), and told him that Diigo would no longer be seeing my support or my content, if that was going to be their position. You might notice that my postings taper off abruptly at that point. Ravn was banned from Diigo shortly after that, his profile suddenly vanishing, but I wasn't about to start posting again. I was really disgusted by what I had just seen.

A few years have passed, and I've come back to see what I can see, and what do I find? Basic functionality is falling apart, and management has, quite swiftly, responded to at least one report of a very seious problem by obscuring the report. The post is still there, it just doesn't show up in the index. That really does seem to be the continuing theme in all of this - cowardice. Rather than face up to unpleasant matters and dealing with them, management has found that it's far easier to just bury the report, and not let people know about the problems, at all.

I mothballed the Ravine for a while - that's the name of my blog, not a personal nickname. Over the years, I've had a slow, steady stream of users choose to follow me, and that matters to me. It would be pretty arrogant of me to not care about somebody expressing interest in something I do, but I'm not really inclined to do it here, not if this is how management is going to act.




To Joel, et al. - I really wanted to like you guys, but you just wouldn't let me. You've consistently taken the path of least resistence without concern for your users or your responsibilities on the job, and worst of all, you seem to be OK with that. You never waver in the exercise of your vices. Somebody with a conscience would.

I'm coming to view a company that I started out feeling warmly toward with genuine loathing, and while I'd be open to feeling otherwise, if the facts were to justify that, I just don't see how they could at this point. Tampering with the record, on the sly, to keep people in later years from seeing how easy it was for you to toss a supporter to the wolves? Granted, we're looking at a fairly wimpy wolf in Ravn's case, more of a feral chihuaha than anything else, but the act remains grotesque, and your ethics seem lacking.

I find myself inspired by all of this to take a bold action, of sorts, but it isn't the sort of inspiration that speaks well of the muse. You've inspired me to give up on social bookmarking. I've got some old page finds stacked up, and I can write about those for a while, and that's fine, but as for being at all active on Diigo, or even looking for a new social bookmarking service to be active on, I'm thinking that this is maybe a very bad idea. Between Stumbleupon gleefully wiping out years of its users' work on October 24, Ma.gnolia losing its user data because the owner saw no need to keep the tech staff around, Propeller pulling a disappearing act, Simpy being turned into a redirect to the Reuters homepage ... I, for one, am very tired of finding myself looking at the screen and going "Oh, G-d, now what". I'm tired of finding the latest way in which people in this section of the Internet are going to foul up, and really seem proud of the fact that they fouled up.

Why say "oy!" when one can say "gevalt!"? The accounts are free, and I'm happy to leave them open, but I am done with these games, and wonder how many other people feel the same way. People whose content would have given this service more credibility than it could ever see from the contributions of Ravn and his ilk, ie. the people who you've chosen to deserve. What kind of content is a person like that going to produce, and who is going to want to read it? Questions that you really should be asking yourselves, at this moment, but I kind of doubt you ever will.

It's been memorable. Later, guys.




PS. I see Diigo has now sunk to the use of inline advertising. I've also noticed that Internet Explorer has started moving over three times as quickly since I've disabled my Diigo toolbar. You are trying to make this decision an easy one, aren't you?

I can't believe I ever defended this company or its staff.

This is a new problem, albeit not a huge one. For the last few days, every time I've turned on the computer for the first time that day, I've found myself logged out of Diigo. Yes, my computer is set to accept cookies; I'm still logged into a number of other sites when my day begins. But not Diigo. The good news (so far) is that the involuntary logouts have only seemed to be happening once per day.

Anybody else notice the same thing?

Let's take a look at comment 11, now. As you will see, it's deletion was equally indefensible, and arguably defamatory in its effect (and, I'd say its intent as well), as it leaves the reader with a distorted picture of what was taking place in this discussion. Ever see Jimmy Kimmel do his "year of unnecessary censorship" pieces? Then you know the game, the difference being that Kimmel lets you in on the game. Let's see what a little added context will do, in this case. Nice try. If you aren't a team member, then you aren't in a position to fix anything, and therefore have no use for the information. You should, therefore, not be asking for it. What you're starting to remind me of, right now, is the sort of person who will follow behind the police and take it upon himself to start doing crowd control on their behalf, manufacturing his own authority; a control freak who pretends to be something that he isn't. People like that don't solve problems, they are problems. All that you did on this occasion was waste my time, and maybe slightly increase my vulnerability to a hacker's attack, by telling him something about the computer I use. In no way were you helpful. In the future, if you wish to feed your ego, please do so on your own time. Thank you.

I'm holding onto copies of this update for reasons which should now be obvious. There is nothing honest about the moderation taking place in this forum. This is really bad. Outrageous, in fact. Perrin, having been called on the fact that he's been creating the illusion that he's something he's not, declares a truthful statement to be a personal attack, on the basis that the truth doesn't make him look very good. This is an argument that should get its maker laughed out of any discussion in which it is made, and yet somebody on staff was willing to engage in censorship, in support of it. Absolutely disgraceful. Open question to those working at Diigo - who did this, and how long ago did you fire him? Tampering with the public record in order to protect a misbehaving user from the public recognition of his misconduct, at the expense of another user with a valid complaint? How much worse could this be?

I just saw the new Diigo, and it took my breath away. Mainly because I was hyperventilating.

Horrible. Utterly, deal breakingly horrible. As somebody who participates in Webring, and was going to put his pages on Diigo onto a few ring systems, having already started work on a homepage for his account, I now find that I have no choice but to immediately cut all links to Diigo.

Where there was order and ease of navigation, now there is a mess. Before, one found the discussions on one portion of the main page for a group, below them the links, one knew which was which and if one had to set up a return link to, say, the ring the visitor came in on - or otherwise help him find his way around, to the homepage for a group or some other place he might need to be - not a problem. One just submitted a few key links to the pool for the group, and there they stayed, where they were needed and everybody could find them. Which really was necessary, because Diigo never saw fit to provide its users with the option of posting links in the descriptions of its groups. This wasn't perfect, but it got the job done.

It doesn't any more. Links and discussions have been tossed together into a common pool, that tidy and easily deciphered ordering being replaced with a scrambling that leaves anybody guessing as to which are the bookmarks and which are the new discussion topics, and no possible way of keeping needed navigational links (group homepage, return to ring) - links the need for which would go without saying on almost any site other than this one - where they can easily be found and accessed. Diigo's staff took what some of us had carefully assembled, and tossed it into the grinder without asking any of us what we thought of the idea, first.

Is the new look a little more stylish than the old? Who knows. Diigo has never been known for its looks, but it was known for its functionality, something a lot more important, and you've destroyed that. Aside from navigational issues, I went to my own group, looking for my own posts, and had trouble finding them - and I wrote them!!! Just imagine the experience being offered to somebody new to the group.

Guys, I'm trying to stay calm and civil, but what's a nice way to say "I can't imagine what you were thinking about"? Not that I doubt that you meant well, but this is unfathomable. I have this mental image of some of you walking into my library, and going "let's help Joe find his stuff in the morning", and just tossing every book in the place on the floor, while putting blue and white bunting over the shelves, and then standing back to see how pretty it looks. Why oh why oh why would you do this?

For half a second - I timed it, it came to about ten heartbeats worth of my time - I thought about picking up what I had written, and looking for a new place to repost it and start afresh, the way I did after Ma.gnolia succeeded in losing all of its user data, but finally thought "why even bother". I'll spend a few days searching for a new host, maybe even a few weeks, maybe not even find one - or maybe I do find one, get set up, make everything look nice, only to have another development staff at another provider flake out, and destroy everything I had been creating. Again.

Why is it so hard for developers on social networking sites to understand that rearranging its users' material without asking them first is a lousy trick to play on them? Could you picture somebody at Freewebs, one day, explaining to me that "Joseph, we decided that what we needed to do was move the material from the sidebar on that one page of yours to the center of the other page, and then move the stuff from there to" ... and succeed in finding many people who would expect me to not be a lot more visibly upset about that than I am about this, right now?

I would be fighting the urge to put my fist through the screen at this moment, if only I weren't feeling a little shaky from the fast. Why, Maggie? Why did you have to fix something that wasn't broken?





PS. Oh, and I see that the homepage link is gone from our profiles, as well. Thank you. That's even better. Not only did I find that my pages had been scrambled, but that their scrambled remains had been shredded as well. Delightful.

Maybe it's just time for me to give up on Diigo, period. Between this, the sticky spam splattered over select portions of the Web, and the business with Mr.Ravn, I'm starting to view this site with a little dread. I think your company welcome trolls and spammers more than it welcomes anybody trying to do anything serious on your space, and I think that's kind of messed up. But I expect that the trolls and spammers will now chime in to disagree.

Oh, well.

In parting, because I've had enough of this subject - in case anybody was wondering why two posts instead of one - that's because Diigo's new and improved software kept cutting the end off of my post, and I got tired of rewriting it.

The sky is lighting up. I think I'll go see how beautiful the morning will be, today.

Bring your cursor up to your name, which you should see in the upper right hand corner of your screen, just to the left of the box with the word "groups" in it. A little box will come onto your screen, containing the following words, in a column profile settings tools sign out Click on "settings". You'll be able to use the box at the top of the screen to reset your password.

Oliver S. wrote:

> And text formatting is possible too by using
> HTML code.
> Of course, rich text editing similar to the way it can be done
> within sticky notes would be better.

I like having HTML as an option, and would hate to see it go - a lot. I hope you're not suggesting that.

Joel Liu wrote:

> We are very busy in preparing the new release ...

It looks like a very cool feature. But I didn't even know that it existed, until just now, and didn't find any links to it from the main page and wonder how many other users had never heard of it, either.

This might be limiting usage and apparent interest in a feature that seems to show great potential.

First of all, I'd like to introduce everybody to a site worth knowing about, called the Internet Archive. Tagline: Surf the net as it was.

Let's say you have a site. Let's choose one that nobody would think is mine: the official homepage of the city of Chicago, located at

http://egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/home.do

Suppose that, out of idle curiousity, you'd like to see what that site looked like in the past. You go to

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/home.do

where you find yourself presented with a menu of past copies of that site, which you can reach by clicking on the date in which the copy was made. For example, here we have the October 8, 2003 copy of that site:

http://web.archive.org/web/20031008120348/http://egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/home.do

What makes this more than an idle source of amusement for us, at this point, is the fact that unless the owner of the url asks that his page be removed from the archive, it will stay in even after it ceases to exist. The archive can be used to recover much of a site that has been hacked, deleted or otherwise lost, if the site has been archived. Anybody who wants to can submit a site, any site, to be archived merely by going to

http://www.alexa.com/help/webmasters#crawl_site

entering the url for the site in the box marked "url", and clicking on "crawl my site", even if it isn't his site, and any url will do. It doesn't have to be an index page or the top page in a domain or anything like that. Which brings me to my suggestion for dealing with the problem of links going dead, and the cleanup that might go with that.

Set the system so that when a page is bookmarked, the url for that page is automatically submitted to the Internet Archive. The staff at the Archive, recently, gained some good press by working overtime to preserve the sites at Geocities, before that provider closed; what Diigo would be doing is very much in keeping with what the Archive is trying to do, and the staff would probably be very happy to work with Diigo on this one.

Then, should the link, on testing, keeping coming up dead for a long enough time that one would be fairly sure that the site wouldn't come back, the Diigo system would realign the links on the reviews associated with that url, so that instead of pointing to

(old url)

then would instead point to

h t t p : / / web . archive . org / web / * / (old url)

(spaces introduced in an attempt to keep the Diigo system from creating links to nowhere)

The system would then put a small annotation on the link indicating that this link is to "an archived site which might no longer be in existence". If it is in existence, there will be a link to it on the top of that menu page for it on the Archive site, and visitors to Diigo will still be able to find it.

This way, the old pages, even after vanishing, can still be read and enjoyed by the visitors, along with the user comments about those sites. The need for cleanup is reduced, and visitors are introduced to a wonderful resource.

Originally Posted to the Diigo Feature Request Community, crossposted here because I'm not sure that Diigo is reading that group, any more. But I hope they are.

"Is there a proper etiquette?"

Probably not, though I'm sure somebody will pretend that there is - who would establish such a thing? Really, something akin to the Golden Rule is worth more than a few reams of text about Netiquette.

Personally, when I'm new on a site and have few friends, I start out by being pretty easy, a regular friends wh ... ummm, gentleman of the evening. If you catch my meaning. I'll say "yes" to almost anybody, because that's how I first become visible.

How few is a few? The largest number of friends I have on any site is eight. I probably would not go above twelve in one location, and would be almost absolutely set on not going above twenty. The only way that could change would be if it had to - ie. a real world friend or family member drops by and asks to be the 21st. I can't say "no" to one of them, but to anybody else, yes, I can. So once I have my third contact, and am visible, I start getting more selective.

Does this person have a real presence - a page with real content that gives me a sense of what his or her interests are, and a little feel for who he or she is - or am I looking at a blank slate? Does this person seem like somebody I could get along with? Do I enjoy reading the page I'm looking at? Also, has this person friended half the population of North America? What I'm looking for in a "friend" is the possibility of building a relationship that would let me take off those quotes and just be a friend. Who has time to be a friend to 3500 different people?

Notes? I've sent notes, but have never received one for this, and don't mind. My thought is "it's just a website, chill and don't make a thing out of it" - we're here to have fun. Just be considerate, and if that's not good enough for somebody else, just move on and don't worry about it.

YMMV, others will differ, and all that other noncommital stuff. It's just how I see things.

Graham Perrin wrote:

> I'll take this opportunity to apologise for the few friend requests that have gone
> unanswered in recent months. I'm awaiting the next version of Diigo before
> responding to them.

Gosh, Graham, what would happen if everybody who had neglected friends requests in the last few months were to submit a comment like that? Why, it would shut down the thread, and as we've seen you argue on another thread, we can't have that. We must get the moderators involved to remove your post, and then properly chastise you.

May I count on your support in this? Also, still having trouble seeing why somebody might find that you were behaving in a manner that suggested just the tiniest bit of egotism on your part? Where would you get the idea that the one thing on our minds, as we read this discussion, was how up to date you were on your friends list? How is that of general relevance?

Mr. Rhay,

My experience with Diigo is very limited, but having moderated and participated in groups elsewhere, I have found one thing to be true: activity attracts activity, and inactivity preserves itself.

"Build it and they will come" is something that I've seen a lot of people try - myself included - and, as a strategy, it always seems to fail. But if you go out, find a few friends, and ask them "could you please help me get this group going and I'll owe you" - and maybe have a number of real, enjoyable conversations in the forum, others might be drawn in.

But be ready to be very patient, because a group can easily take a few years to get going. If you like the people you're trading thoughts with, though, those few years of talking just to them might not seem a burden, and when the group finally really does get going, your sudden success might seem almost to be a free gift.

I could be wrong, however.

"Why not Hotmail then?"

I can think of one reason why you might want to avoid that. According to Google, a number of users probably lost their gmail accounts to hackers this way:

1. They used hotmail or live.com addresses to register their Google accounts.

2. They failed to log in for a year.

3. The hotmail accounts lapsed.

.... and here is where the story gets interesting ...

4. Hotmail recycled their ids, allowing the hackers to take on their victim's identities, as far as the Google system was concerned. Using the contact address, they requested the "lost" passwords for "their" gmail accounts (read: their victims' gmail accounts), which they then hijacked.

In principle, one could do the same to a Diigo account registered that way, or anything else registered through hotmail. The motivation for stealing the Gmail accounts seems to have been the desire to use them for spamming, and while a Diigo account can't be used for mass mailing, you might notice that this site does have a large population of spammers.

So, you might want to be careful, even at the risk of being overly careful.

Out of curiosity:

Does anybody know of any pages with black backgrounds that had something highlighted on them? I'm wondering how that looked.

Not everybody uses a light background when laying out a page. Some of us find all of that glare unpleasant to look at, after a while.

Same problem as Mr.Hanneken, though not as acute - three of my bookmarks have, without my consent and without justification, been changed to private. I mentioned this elsewhere, on a thread that he linked to on August 11.

"The absence of a reply (in any topic, not this one in particular) should not be misinterpreted as wilful silence. "

For reasons I cite elsewhere, it does raise serious concerns. I'd like to think that we're looking at no more than one employee doing this without management's approval, but ... is there more than one employee?

Really, how much do we know about Diigo, or most other social networking sites for that matter? By the way - the first post in this discussion will soon be two months old, with no sign of a reply by Diigo's staff. I agree with Eric - they're probably not willing to respond.

Graham Perrin wrote:

> A typo. I meant Joel.
>
> Please keep personal insults out of the public area.

Graham, get off of it. If you're going to behave arrogantly, you're going to get called arrogant. That's life. Grow up and deal with it.

> > In other words

> In other words, respectfully: somewhere more suitable. This topic is suitable,
> and this topic is not hidden.

Case in point, and let's add "liar" to the list of noncomplimentary noninsults that you may receive. You didn't just call for this bookmark or that to be moved - you called for every bookmark that I had submitted to this group to be removed, most of which have nothing to do with this discussion. One which you very clearly entered with mind already made up, carrying the proverbial axe to grind.

Three bookmarks out of the massive pile already assembled will not shut anything down, and I think you know that. But they will beautifully illustrate the absurdity of the events that have occured, and that's really isn't something you want people to see, is it, Graham? Looking at the massive level of posting we've seen from you on this group, one that casts your complaint about my three little bookmarks (and their 14 unrelated little friends) in a truly absurd light, one might well ask if you have any life outside of Diigo at all, and indeed, much of a life outside of this group. The concept that people might look and see for themselves that there are signs that Diigo, indeed, did do wrong, really horrifies you, doesn't it?

So much so that you're willing to attempt to abuse the disciplinary process on a site in order to keep people from seeing what you don't want them to see. That's what is truly disgraceful, and whining about how I've "insulted" you won't make the disgrace go away. Doing so merely provides Diigo with a chance to disgrace itself by acting on your sordid request.

Let's see if they do.

Graham Perrin wrote:

> I'll respond to none of your points now or in the future.

Wave, wave, bye, bye - and good riddance.

I just edited an old post on a group, and noticed that Diigo has jumped onto the bandwagon and started adding rel=nofollow to all outbound links in its groups. Guys, please stop doing that.

The standard argument for using nofollow is that its use deters spammers, even if the rate of spammage would seem to have increased since the introduction of nofollow. This belief can easily be seen to be nonsense by anybody who has ever waited for one of his sites to appear in the search engines listings. Why? Because that process can take months, sometimes even years, and spam sites don't tend to live that long. Within weeks of a site being so promoted, sometimes even within days, complaints about the spam will have gone in to the service hosting the site and to the site's registrar by the truckload, and the site will be gone. Only to be replaced by a brand new site at a brand new location, selling the same old stuff, as anybody who, out of perverse curiosity, has ever clicked on a link on a semi-old spam message (and then checked his newer e-mail) almost certainly has seen for himself.

Spammers work by getting large numbers of visitors to go to throwaway sites that won't live long enough to rise in the search engine ratings, so pagerank won't matter to them. Logically, it shouldn't, and if we take a look at spammer behavior following the introduction of nofollow, we find no evidence whatsoever that it does. It can, however, matter immensely to those who are trying to establish a web presence for themselves honestly, by doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing, that which the search engines are supposed to be encouraging them to do - by creating and posting content that people want to read and link to. Let's say that one of us posts content to a "black hole", a site that (like Diigo) has rel-nofollowed all outbound links, including the homepage links on our profiles. (Check it out - Diigo has done this). Let us say that somebody looks at the content, likes the content, and links to it. Diigo gets a search engine boost, but the person who took the time and did the work to create that content doesn't. Meaning that his other sites would have done better in the search engines if he had posted that content elsewhere, where nofollow wasn't being used.

In effect, he is being penalised for having chosen Diigo (or some other black hole) as the place where he would post his content. Nofollow hurts the legitimate poster, while having absolutely no direct impact on the spammer. But it can have an indirect impact, as one can see by looking at services like Simpy, where the spam has taken over.

Think of the difference between being the one guy who's speeding while everybody else is staying below the limit, and being that same guy when everybody else is doing 85, too. You're still breaking the rules, and you still know that (theoretically) you can be slapped down for that, but there's a great feeling of safety in numbers. As the ratio of spam to legitimate content goes up, the spammers get bolder and more aggressive, as anybody who has ever been away from a forum he moderated for a little too long knows - spam tends to snowball, and probably for the same reason that the number of speeders will start to soar after a point; because one's chances of being one of the people grabbed and sanctioned are dropping. The life expectancy of one's spam is rising, and the profitability of it is doing likewise in the process, a thought that will lure more spammers in to take advantage of this opportunity.

There's the indirect impact on the spammers - by undercutting the incentive given to one's legitimate contributors, one helps create a friendlier environment for those spammers, which perhaps is why the rate of spammage has gone up since the introduction of nofollow. The law of unintended consequences has kicked in with a vengeance, and why wouldn't it? If somebody, in "real life" (offline) decides to treat all of his visitors as if they were scofflaws, hardly anybody is surprised when he eventually finds himself surrounded by nothing but scofflaws; honest men expect to be treated with respect. Why should life work any differently online? Because treating us all like we're spammers, even after we've proved that we're not through months or years of honest posting, isn't even remotely respectful. Even if it is fashionable.

Yes, I know that dealing with spammers can be exhausting, and I'm sure that one will be greatly tempted to believe that a shortcut can be found to doing that tedious, emotionally unrewarding task, much the same way as some of us would like to believe that we can find a fun way of getting around the need to do cleanup in the lab, or that's there's some diet that allows one to lose weight and reduce one's cholesterol while eating all of the steak, bacon and chocolate one wants, maybe by nibbling a few acai berries or something like that. But reality is what it is, and it either gets dealt with on its own terms, or it gets worse. Sometimes, a lot worse.

One doesn't win popularity points by reminding people of this, but it is the truth.

I recently found the following three entries marked "private" on my bookmark page, which I found surprising, because I've never marked a post "private" in the entire time I've been here. Links and blocked posts follow.

Drug War Goes Crazy, Cyclist Forced to Provide Sample at Son's Cremation

My comments: "This, regrettably, is no joke. An official barged in as the cyclist was making arrangements for his son's funeral.

Somebody needs to be fired, not reprimanded or suspended.

Tags: war on drugs, abuse of power, outrageous, insensitive less than a minute ago -All Annotations (0) -Cached -About

in group: Odd News"




Policing Porn Is Not Part of Job Description

My Comments: "Men in Black gone wild. Employees of a county department of Homeland Security decide to make their own laws about the viewing of porn.

Tags: abuse of authority, censorship 4 minutes ago and saved by 4 people -All Annotations (1) -Cached -About

in group: Computer and Internet, Computers and Internet, Odd News"



Teens send nude pics to one other, face kiddie porn charges - Ars Technica

My Comments: "Law that is good in principle, applied without the use of common sense or basic logic.

One of the reasons why underaged teens aren't allowed to consent to model nude - without parental consent, and there are issues enough in that to justify a whole other post - is because children are believed to lack the mental capacity to fully understand the decisions that they are making. Yet now they are to prosecuted for making those very same decisions on their own, as if they were competent adults who had preyed on incompetent children, luring them into decisions their victims might later regret, leaving us with a pick and mix in which the teens are regarded as being both competent and incompetent at same time, the state they are to be viewed as being in depending on the needs of the argument under which they are to be imprisoned at each given point.

Doublethink a la Orwell being used as a basis for Law, as the underaged are put in danger of sent to prison (where they are likely to be raped) using a law designed to protect them from a form of sexual exploitation.

Tags: injustice, court, law, trial, imprisonment, consent, pornography laws, common sense 7 minutes ago -All Annotations (0) -Cached -About

in group: philosophy, Philosophical perspectives"


Note the total absent of profanity, adult material, or anything else that might be reasonably considered to be unacceptable for general audiences in both my posts and the articles linked to. Yet somebody on staff took it upon himself to obscure these posts from public view, engaging in censorship in the process.

Is it Diigo's position that the only political views which may be heard in our comments are those that the staff personally views with approval? If so, this is completely unacceptable. If not, what efforts have been made to restrain those employees who have violated the trust put in them by users and employer alike by grossly exceeding their own authority?

I've switched the posts back from private to public. If Diigo is uncomfortable with this, I'm sure that it will do what it feels it needs to do, but it should understand that I will do the same. At this moment, I am very disappointed.

Those three bookmarks of mine, after staying public for a while, are private, again.

I would have to respectfully disagree with Mr. Perrin's guess. Whoever or whatever did this seemed to wait until my attention had wandered. System bugs don't tend to be smart enough to do that, but human beings do.

I suspect that Diigo has a rogue employee on its hands.

Graham Perrin wrote:

> Within the Diigo team there is expertise in "intelligent systems, a branch of artificial intelligence that examines methods and algorithms for systems to self-optimize and adapt".

Yeah ... rather intriguingly, in the majority of cases in which this alleged bug has made an appearance so far, we've apparently seen governmental conduct help up to criticism - providing a motive for censorship, should one not approve of this practice, and a motive to lie should one be caught in the act.

We also have no answer being given to the question of why it was that this bug didn't reappear until after a few days had passed, and one could expect the user's attention to have wavered. We just have you saying "Diigo's actions must be wholly innocent, because Diigo says so".

But maybe after you succeed in getting my bookmarks censored, though, you'll manage to get my posts censored as well, and you won't have to deal with the issue, at all.

Won't that be wonderful?