Re: Testing Discourse for Debian - Moderation concepts

[rhkramer@gmail.com]

I reordered the quoted paragraphs to make it more consistent with bottom 
posting.

On Wednesday, April 15, 2020 07:24:03 AM Neil McGovern wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 15, 2020 at 12:47:06PM +0200, Ansgar wrote:

> No, but it is required for things like knowing which posts in a topic is
> popular, so should be used for auto-summary. It also is used to reduce
> abuse, as a normal new user would spend time reading topics before
> posting for the first time.

> > I'm not concerned about marking messages read after some time and
> > keeping the view time in ephermal storage for that.  But that's not
> > what Discourse does: as described elsewhere it stores all read times
> > persistently on the server; that would not be neccessary for marking
> > posts as read even on a web application.

I think I understand what Ansgar wrote here, but I'm not 100% sure.

I use kmail with pop3.  As far as I know, even if kmail does keep track of my 
reading time to mark emails as read (which I think I saw as an option once and 
disabled), I'm pretty sure, and certainly hope that information is stored (or 
used and discarded "instantly" (for some value of instantly)) only on my local 
machine.

I don't know if the situation is the same if I used imap, but there are 
several reasons I don't use imap, some relating to privacy issues.

To keep that reading time on any kind of central server would be a big 
invasion of my privacy.  I wouldn't mind something like I mentioned in another 
email, the writer of an email volunteering information about how thoroughly he 
has read something before replying, but for something to collect my reading 
time and make inferences about it is not acceptable to me.

Oh, and I guess that is the thing that I forgot in that other email -- I might 
be willing to say that I didn't read an email (TL;DR) before responding, or 
some variations, that might imply that I tried to read, but don't think I 
clearly (or fairly?) understood the email I'm replying to, and some others 
along those lines.