Reference entry clearance procedure

A cookbook and subject to discussion and improvements

In order to enforce our policy regarding entries at the TracUsers page, here are some recipes to follow as a general rule. Having an clearly outlined process is certainly good for forming common principles, standards for the collaborative clearance work and keep the process explicitly open for review and discussion of improvements as needed.

Internet research

Not much to say here. We just follow a link, if provided, or try to find the corresponding site by other means and look for a public Trac there or at least an explicit reference to one.

Direct contact

If the previous step fails, but we've found an inquiry web form or at least an appropriate email address, we'll send out a formal inquiry. We want to send just one inquiry to keep the overall process time per entry low, so we better try hard to make sure it reaches the recipient at least, right? That's why I personally prefer web forms to avoid possible email loss by false SPAM filtering at recipients site.

Here are some samples, that I use extensively, with slight modification as I see the need for it.

general inquiry

subject: Inquiry regarding Trac usage update

Dear Madams and Gentlemen,

according to http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracUsers you've declared,
that you did use Trac software in the past, or someone else did so on
your behalf.

Since there is no public Trac according to my research and I can't find
other evidence for Trac usage at the current website as well, I do
request kindly, that you declare yourself regarding current Trac usage,
at least internally. Further information/short usage summary would be
perfect.

Please note, this is purely for reference, no commercial interests from
my/our side. You don't need to declare anything, but I'll consider
deletion of the entry in question after 10 days without feedback from
your side.

Thank you for taking care.

Sincerely

<sender signature>

general inquiry (German version)

Betreff: Anfrage zur (internen) Verwendung von Trac

Werte Damen und Herren,

auf http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracUsers wurde durch Sie oder andere
ein Referenzeintrag für Ihre Firma angelegt.

Es wäre sehr hilfreich für meine Überprüfung, wenn Sie mir kurz
rückmelden, ob Sie Trac (noch) intern einsetzen, weil dies aus Ihrer
Internet-Präsenz nicht hervorgeht.

Sie haben keinerlei Verpflichtungen, so wie ich keine wirtschaftlichen
Interessen verfolge. Ich erlaube mir allerdings die Freigabe zur
Löschung des fraglichen Eintrags, wenn sich binnen 10 Tagen niemand dazu
äußert.

Vielen Dank im voraus für jede mögliche Aufklärung in dieser Sache.

Mit freundlichem Gruß

<Signatur des Absenders>

common additions

• if contact is questionable (i.e. there are several possible contacts, and we send on inquiry to each one or at least to the most likely one)

  In your case a clearer reference would be appreciated too,
  since your company's name is not unique at a worldwide scale.
  

German version

In Ihrem Fall wäre ggf. noch eine Präzisierung des Eintrags sinnvoll,
so er wirklich Ihr Unternehmen betrifft.

After sending at least one inquiry, we move the entry to the section 'Undecided, inquiry pending' and append a note regarding the end of the minimal response time to it:

(without feedback to be deleted after <date = today + 10d>)

Ideas about future policy

Originally, TracUsers had been free for all, like any other normal wiki page. Over the time, this has lead to abuses and we reacted by turning on the read-only mode for that page.

As we recently switched to writable again, I can only witness that a good part of the new edits (other than from the caretakers) are blatantly ignoring our guidelines, and put a link to their (commercial) website. By doing so, we have no idea if they're really using Trac or just using this page as a way to generate some traffic on their site…

At this point, I'm not sure if they just willingly ignore the guidelines or they simply copy/paste from other examples, those we have left unreviewed and which contain links. So the first move is to "sanitize" those links, removing them if they're stale, moving the Trac instances in a group so that we can later categorize them in the table at the top, and finally unwikify links targeting non-Trac sites (not removing them so that we can still try to get in touch like explained in the first part of this page).

If after that the situation don't improve, I would suggest that we turn the read-only flag on again, and suggest people to send us an entry via MailingList.