A Design for Automated Discussion Destruction

lily does not have an infinite volume of storage or the interface capacity for an infinite number of discussions. Yet the desire of users to create and persist discussions expresses both the value of the discussion itself and the often deeply personal motivations or interests which lead to its creation. Because of this personal investment and an ongoing dissent about what constitutes a truely idle discussion, emotions have run entirely too hot about the policy as it regards discussion reaping.

Those cases where there is a genuine loss sadden me, but worse still is the disproportionate anger with which people respond. The former is a technology problem which I plan to solve right now. The latter can be minimized by moving the task from human to software hands. But it also behooves us to remember we are all here for some reason, and we owe it to the community to treat each other reasonably.

The technology resolution is the implementation of an automated discussion cleanup technique called "The Reaper." The reaper is designed around a single fundamental rule: the people decide what is important. If a discussion is hugely popular with the users it deserves to persist for a much longer period of innactivity than a one-shot discussion with only a few participants. Each discussion is granted a base level of idle time. More idle time is then granted based on the status of the discussion and the number of participants.

The process itself runs on an hourly basis and destroys discussions based on the following rules:

PUBLIC DISCUSSIONS

Any discussion marked as "invulnerable" is exempt from being reaped because it is viewed as a public asset regardless of ownership. For those of you who have such eminently useful discussions the community extends its sincere thanks.

The maximum idle time for a public discussion is seven days plus two days per member.

PRIVATE DISCUSSIONS

Any private discussion with fewer than three members is exempt from being reaped. This aims to preserve the 'private room' system which people have established by tradition on lily.

Those with three or more users have a maximum idle time of seven days plus three days per user.

When a discussion is destroyed, all of the moderators, with valid email in their /FINGER info, will receive a copy of all the content associated with the discussion. This includes the name, title, membership list, permission lists, info, memos and review buffer. The bottom of the message will contain the commands necessary to recreate the discussion.

This is the best place to have ongoing conversations about both the rules and the implementation of the reaper. I will pay as much attention here as possible, and as always this element of lily needs to express the sensus fidelium not just my own personal desires.

Each of the fixed times about is driven by a property on the reaper:

• $reaper.nBaseIdle 7 days -- Basic number of days a discussion may be idle.
• $reaper.nIdlePerUser 2 days -- The number of additional days per user in a public discusison.
• $reaper.nPrivatePerUser 3 days -- The number of addtional days per user in a private discussion.
• $reaper.nMaxPrivate 2 users -- The maximum number of users for a private discussion to be considered a "room."

This design for the reaper was vetted to an initial group of four people for review and was rejected. I record it here for the purposes of history only. I now return to retirement.