How can I retire from Advogato?

i've seen it asked before and the general consensus is that it's not possible... at most, remvoe your contact info from your profile, possibly indicate that you are no longer active, and just move on. Otherwise it will fuck with the trust metric.

It is indeed impossible to remove advogato accounts. Such a feature could certainly be added, but I don't expect there's much will to write such an addition (except perhaps on your part?) This issue isn't so much the trust metric. It would leave a hole, yes, but it's easy enough to search through and remove all the broken certs and recalculate.

This issue is more that your involvement on the site, and the diary entries and article comments are part of an historical record, and I don't think it's reasonable to ask that that be erased. amars suggestion that you just mark yourself as retired is a perfectly reasonable solution to the issue. You're gone but your contributions remain.

I too think that the "Free Software" movement nowadays has a very negative image. Personally I like to release as Open Source whatever I do, but I've never called my stuff "Free Software", and nor will I do it, even though I do use the GPL. I don't want to be associated more than necessarily with various fanatics in the FS movement...

Why does anyone think that the Advogato trust metric has any value at all? It's the kind of thing that only works for binary-valued questions (e.g. does the username JoeBlow really represent well-known programmer Joe Blow). However, since Advogato started out asking people to say whether other people belonged to certain categories, but then assigned meanings to these categories that contradicted the meanings of the words used to describe them, it was damaged from the start: some people did their ratings based on the standard meanings of words like Master, Journeyer, etc, and some read the very different meanings given by the advogato site (e.g. that to be a Master one must work full-time on a free software project in a lead role: any definition that, if taken literally, would force us to rate Edsger Dijkstra or Dennis Ritchie as an Apprentice at best has something wrong with it!).

The assumption that trust is transitive is broken: someone may universally be acknowledged to be a Master even though that person is known to lack integrity (demonstrated by rating other people who would be Master under either meaning of the word as Apprentice just because of personal dislike).

It's annoying that Advogato will not let people withdraw. If the architecture makes this a problem, there could be a placeholder for former users.

I agree with jbuck's comments.

Also I feel the free software community would be much better served with a newsgroup, than the diary/article/trust hybrid that Advovagto is. Simple moderation schemes could get rid of spam.

Often people communicate in threads of discussion in the linear recent log, usenet already handles this much better. Also the kind of people who might have valuable contributions to a free software discussion, might not be the same type of people who keep or read online diaries and individual home pages. I for one am not, but accept Advogato as kludge for communicating with the free software commnunity at large.

To note, my above use of the term "free software" has no connection with the Free Software Movement or the Free Software Foundation.

I'm not going to try to claim it's perfect, but for the most part people who have some involvement in free software (perhaps slight) can get certs, and there are not very many people with no involvement who do not have certs. This is the goal of the trust metric.

There's definitely cert inflation. I think I understand the issue better. That's a big part of the reason I did the site.

mslicker: by all means, use a newsgroup if it suits you better. Perhaps the spam problem really can be solved easily. Clearly most usenet users have not found it so.

To answer the original question: what rillian said. Deleting accounts is not conceptually hard, but the code would have to go fix up all the dangling references and so on. The trust metric itself isn't the hard part, because it's actually computed de novo each time.

It's much easier just to consider the account inactive. If anyone feels strongly enough, the usual technique of submitting a patch ought to work.

Well the main problem is you are mixing trust and a popularity contest. Trust graphs in themselves could be useful in distributed moderation. You can trust someone and disagree with what they say. Certification as it is implemented is explicit support of a person, or as pointed out explicit dislike of a person.

The levels and the ratings I consider useless. Everyone has their own conception of mastery. Mastery should never be explicit, a stamp of approval, but implicit. A master in the minds of many. Certifications and ratings only serve to prejdice the contents of ones writing. Is anyone really trying to climb this social ladder?

The newsgroup does not suit me if there is no one to communicate with. My only point was that it is a better medium of communication than the recentlog. A newsgroup could augment this site and use the trust information as a moderation tool. I like the free software focus of this site, and how brings together many people of different parts of the community. In this way, I am exposed to ideas and developments I would have otherwise not been exposed to.

...any definition that, if taken literally, would force us to rate Edsger Dijkstra or Dennis Ritchie as an Apprentice at best has something wrong with it!

Would it really? Of course, both of these men are great men, but are they really free software luminaries? Might they be, perhaps, apprentices in free software?

My biggest problem with the metric are the ghelloworld people who go and rate their best buds as Master. I think there may be less of this today.