It might also be seen as more of a guarantee that the writer understood what s/he was signing up for if there was ever a question.

And much easier to sort/list than a bunch of posts in a thread, I'd think.

We might as well wait until erinaceous can put all the details (so far) out there at once. It'll probably save some confusion.

True. The advantage of email I can see is that it wouldn't clog up a thread. It might also be seen as more of a guarantee that the writer understood what s/he was signing up for if there was ever a question.

Except that would only work for posters who have email addresses in their profiles, which can also be removed or changed at will so it does pose a slight authentication problem. If this project was actually going to move forward, you could have a short-term temporary thread for opt ins, that could get threadsucked and deleted after the fact.

Shiny! I'm all for this. It sounds foamy.

The data can be anonymized so that no user name, personal name, or place name appears. So that "I hung out in Somerville with Emily and VWbug last night" would appear as "I hung out in PLACENAME with PERSONNAME and PERSONNAME last night." Actual replacement strings would vary.

Although I feel for the poor suckers who have to strip proper names from things.

Fnord.

For simplicity's sake, I would think people would have to say either a blanket yes or a blanket no to having their posts used. I don't know if I could deal with people who said okay for one thread but not another -- it could get really complicated, really fast.

This seems a reasonable criteria.

I also said that I would do the pre-processing to remove the posts of people who didn't opt in, so that no NonBuffista eyes would ever see material that wasn't specifically okayed for inclusion.

Thanks.

(Luckily, the html on the threadsuck is really well done. Props to the Stompies!)

Always a good idea.

I heard back from one of the organizers, and it looks like there would need to be a specific opt-in. So I would say the board as a whole would have to approve the general idea (because we are, of course, a COMMUNITY, and the idea of somebody saying "I'm gonna take my posts and put them over here" all cowboy-like doesn't appeal to me), but then each individual person who wants their posts in the corpus would have to send me permission. Whether that means just an email or signing a form, I dunno yet.

Sounds perfect!

As far as emailing vs posting opt-in goes, could we modify the voting email form to be an opt-in form? That way we don't clutter up the board, and there's no way for someone to opt-in for anyone but themselves.

could we modify the voting email form to be an opt-in form?

Ooh, Jess smart. That's a good idea.

You know what's neat? "Nilly" and "meara" could end up in the dictionary.

That would be so cool! Mejia, too.

Heh. I just thought it could be complicated to distinguish between the times it's a name and the times it's all other sort of parts of a sentence.