Anonymous Poster
I just forwarded this thread to a colleage and he says it requires login to view. That's weird, right?

Steven Karel: I'm guessing it was Danny who wrote:

...requires login to view. That's weird, right?

I can confirm that the observation is correct, and I think that's different than it used to be. Why shouldn't anonymous users be able to read this forum? Not like there are any secrets here.

David Wisniewski
Not strange; this is a change I've been meaning to make for years. myBrandeis needs to be for Brandeis. I get enough commentary about people's messages being public when they really ought not to be. Coincidental that the timing just hit with this thread ongoing. a side advantage is that we (and Steve K especially) will no longer be playing free tech support to the masses. ;-)

Making just Tech Support public would be good, but there are other forums that are also useful to have available to the world. I'm sure prospective students could learn a lot about the Brandeis experience by reading posts here in new student forums, for example. Sure, they can sign up to read them, but if Google doesn't index the site, how will they find them?

I don't believe this is a decision which should be made without community discussion, much less implemented without any sort of announcement. It's true that WALAS owns the myBrandeis application and holds final policy control over it, but the community is what makes the site work. If you go against the will of the community, you'll be likely to find myBrandeis replaced with another application you don't control.

There are some interesting philosophical issues here. The whole point of a community system is to get the community to interact with itself. Opening the community to 'the world' can have serious negative implications. I've done a fair bit of research into this area, since it is my academic field of study :-) No solution is the best because of the trade offs.

Finally, I want to point out that there is nothing about control; I'm not interested in it. The point is to provide a comfortable and engaging location for students and Brandeis affiliates to interact. Part of our jobs as administrators, staff, and faculty is to provide an atmosphere that is safe, engaging, and useful to our constituents.

This discussion should carry on.. right now, however, I'm going to go back to rest since I'm out sick(!)

About the search / indexing question... these are separate (and very good) issues. Relying on Google is not a good reason to keep content open - Brandeis owns *lots* of content that is privileged (and thus, Google doesn't know about). We're (LTS) interesting in providing a powerful and useful search tool for Brandeis' content, and WaLAS has the charge of defining and building out the 'next-gen' search tool for the campus. More on that, later.

As for the bboard, the solution isn't necessarily (as Homer might say) 'can't Google do it?". The problem of the bboard having lousy indexing is solved by developing a better index system. :-) That was also on my to-do list.

Knowledge management is such a tricky subject there are whole professions out there. I've been getting involved with Boston's KMForum, and recommend the group to anyone interested in such topics.

My point in mentioning Google wasn't that public search should be allowed to index our privileged content, but that bboard content shouldn't be privileged. Even if we succeed in getting all Brandeis community members to use our in-house search engine, prospective students would still need Google to find discussions here.

Even a few years gone from Brandeis, I still frequently consult myBrandeis. I have often found technical problems solved or addressed on myBrandeis threads that have been referenced elsewhere or found through Google. (Aside: the ITS site used to be invaluable as well, but much of that content is now absent and what remains is often out of date.)

I often point people at Harvard to relevent myBB threads, including during a debate with Harvard Central IT about spam filtering and message attachment renaming. The information here is frequently highly interesting, valuable, and not necessarily readily available elsewhere.

I'll also second what Steve said -- as a prefrosh oh so many years ago, I found myBrandeis and read these very bboards, although I didn't actually *register* until I had a UNet account. Plus the fact that searching with Google often works better, and it seems like there are better things to do with myBrandeis than rewriting an aging search system (like, err, upgrading to a new platform? or making the default theme not purple?)

On a slightly related topic, most days at work I still think to myself (regarding the projects I work on) "if only this was written in OpenACS." Despite having absolutely no say in the matter and no vested interest anymore, I vote for OpenACS/.LRN for myBrandeis.

Whom I have found to be an invaluable brain trust to help me understand why certain things at Carleton are the way they are, technically and otherwise.

If those forums were any less open to alumni, I would be far less effective at Carleton. I would assume that my long history of mouthing off here has been valuable to Josh/Keith, too.

Some simple things could mitigate the negative effects of the too-open bboards without walling in the garden completely:

1) As mentioned above, consider removing names unless you log on (but note that users can freely change their names, that prospects have historically been identified only as "username Anonymous," etc)

2) If you're particularly concerned that particular types of private information are being leaked, expand the "dirty words and regular expressions" list. For example, I believe it is still impossible to post brandeis.edu email addresses here.

3) Make it harder, but still possible, for non-brandeis.edu users to log on. There's a "confirm email address *plus* admin approval" option.

4) *Absolutely* prevent regular users from creating new bboards. That was a controversial decision made a long time ago, and the original reasons no longer apply. We've had a lot of spammers create and post to new bboard topics. There's no reason for that.

5) Make [most parts of] Classifieds brandeis.edu-only.

Anna, improving the static content is a plus, but Web 2.0 is all about welcoming users onto the Clue Train and having a conversation. Not only students (and prospects!), but also professors under age 35 increasingly expect and demand to participate where appropriate.

One of the reasons that caucus.carleton.edu is used primarily by Carleton alumni and older faculty, not current students and young faculty, is that there's both a learning curve and a login hump. my.brandeis.edu was a far more vibrant community.

my.brandeis.edu was (past tense?) the home page for a great many students. They could see at a glance what's going on without having to enter their password. Some chose to contribute, others didn't, but all were able to benefit.

From a security perspective, forcing people to enter their password just to see the top page of my.brandeis.edu (not that you're talking about doing that -- you're not, are you?) is a bad idea. Don't require credentials unless you really need them. The more you ask for credentials, the more users are vulnerable to phishing scams.

Of course, login.brandeis.edu helps substantially. It *should* be relatively easy to allow at least one-way preauthentication, though not single-logout, between login.brandeis.edu and my.brandeis.edu.

6) If what you really want is for bboard posts not to show up in search engines -- and I would agree with Steven Karel that removing them would be tragic -- then you can accomplish that with robots.txt. Indeed, only robots.txt and a re-indexing will remove past posts from google's index. Requiring login only hides *future* posts.

No longer being a current member of this community, I can only advise you to discuss this seriously with the community before making changes.

There was a brief piece on NPR yesterday or the day before interviewing the editor of New York Magazine (?) regarding the post-Internet generation's different attitude towards privacy. It was really interesting. There was a bit about how virtually everyone under age 30 has embarrassed themselves online, AND LEARNED TO GET OVER IT. Very interesting generational shift. Find and share it with Lori (?).

"Digital Natives" are those people for whom the internet and related technologies are givens, whereas "Digital Immigrants" migrated to these technologies later in life (Prensky, 2001). Digital Immigrants know how life existed in the pre-networked society, whereas Digital Natives take networked communication as the foundation of their lives.

The focus of this research is on exploring the impacts of this generational demarcation. By learning as much as we can about Digital Natives, their way of life, and their way of thinking, we can address the issues their digital practices raise, and shape our legal, educational, and social institutions in a way that supports and protects natives, while harnessing the exciting possibilities their digital fluency presents.

Is anyone from Brandeis planning to attend, BTW? Dave?