how to disturb newbies

[Richard Gaskin]

larry wrote:

 > I appreciate all this effort to improve the Dictionary.
 > But I feel the discussion about allowing EACH LC user to personally
 > modify the Dictionary with his/her own notes is being overlooked.
 > I think it is crazy that LC only allows notes in the Dictionary that
 > have been reviewed by the staff.

It may seem crazy until you consider the alternative:  once any 
communications venue is open for unmoderated posting by everyone, it 
becomes a spam magnet.

If it weren't for the daily efforts of the volunteer forum moderators, 
the LiveCode forums would be an unusable cesspool of spam.

Like the forums, an unmoderated Comments facility in the Dictionary 
would require significant manual effort from a sizable team to keep it 
in check.

We often don't think about spam as an issue, but that's only because of 
the team of moderators working across multiple time zones culling such 
posts and banning those accounts almost as soon as they come in, every day.

Personally, I find the forum spam moderation more than enough work for 
me, and I'd guess Klaus and the mods feel the same.  Adding Dictionary 
policing to that task load would take resources away from the community 
that could be better applied to more interesting things, like:


 > I WANT to add my own notes to the Dictionary, edit the examples,
 > etc.  In short, I don't want to wait around for the LC Community
 > to fix MY Dictionary.

I can't fault others for wanting to share the benefits of their learning 
with the rest of the community.  That desire for sharing is what's 
motivating the focus around an enhancement process that benefits 
everyone.  LiveCode is a relatively recent entrant into the open source 
world, but as we move forward we're finding ever better ways to 
coordinate the desires of community members to help others for maximum 
benefit for all.

That said, I recognize that from time to time folks may have a desire 
for something more specialized, in your case for local personal notes. 
Thankfully Peter Haworth (whom I had the pleasure of finally meeting in 
person at RevLive last month) seems to have come through for you - this 
is from a post he made here yesterday:

 > I have a free plugin that allows you to enter your own notes
 > and tags about a dictionary entry.  They are local to you so
 > not available to all users.
 >
 > If interested, you can find it at
 > http://www.lcsql.com/free-stuff.html

Thank you, Peter, for taking the time to craft that tool and your 
generosity in sharing it with the community.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  LiveCode Community Manager
  richard at livecode.org