Editing Advogato

{{short description|Free software online community}}
{{Infobox website
| name             = Advogato
| logo             = Advogato logo.png
| screenshot       = 
| caption          = 
| url              = {{URL|http://www.advogato.org/}}
| commercial       = 
| type             = Community site and [[List of social networking websites|social network site]] for free software developers
| language         = 
| registration     = 
| owner            = 
| author           = [[Raph Levien]]
| launch_date      = 1999
| current_status   = inactive
| revenue          = 
}}

'''Advogato''' was an [[online community]] and [[social networking site]] dedicated to [[free software]] development and created by [[Raph Levien]]. In 2007, Steve Rainwater took over maintenance and new development from Raph. In 2016, Rainwater's running instance was shut down and backed up to [[Internet Archive|archive.org]].

== History ==
Advogato described itself as "the free software developer's advocate." Advogato was an early pioneer of [[blog]]s, formerly known as "online diaries", and one of the earliest social networking websites. Advogato combined the most recent entries from each user's diary together into a single continuous feed called the ''recentlog'', directly inspiring the creation of the [[Planet aggregator]] somewhat later.{{fact|date=January 2014}}

Several high-profile members of the [[free software]] and [[open source software]] movements were users of the site, including [[Richard M. Stallman]], [[Eric Raymond]],  [[Alan Cox (computer programmer)|Alan Cox]], [[Bruce Perens]], and [[Jamie Zawinski]].

Because Advogato was the first website to use a robust, attack-resistant [[trust metric]] and to release the underlying code for that trust mechanism under a free software license, it has been the basis of numerous research papers on trust metrics and social networking (see the list below for specific examples). Advogato's early adoption of an [[XML-RPC]] interface led to its use as an example of how such interfaces could be used by web programmers.<ref>Cadenhead, Rogers, Teach Yourself Programming with Java in 24 Hours, Sams, 2005</ref>

Advogato saw use as a testbed for social networking and semantic web technologies. [[Tim Berners-Lee]], who was an Advogato user himself, included Advogato in a short list of sites notable for their early adoption of the [[FOAF]] as a method of exporting user RDF URIs.<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20071212235629/http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=7126 Tim Berners-Lee: From World Wide Web to Giant Global Graph]</ref>

== Trust metric ==
The motivating idea for Advogato was to try out in practice Levien's ideas about attack-resistant [[trust metric]]s, having users certify each other in a kind of [[peer review]] process and use this information to avoid the abuses that plague open community sites.  Levien observed that his notion of attack-resistant trust metric was fundamentally very similar to the [[PageRank]] algorithm used by [[Google]] to rate article interest. In the case of Advogato, the trust metric was designed to include all individuals who could reasonably be considered members of the Free Software and Open Source communities while excluding others.

The implementation of this trust metric was through an [[Apache modules|Apache module]] called ''mod_virgule''.  ''mod_virgule'' is free software, licensed under the [[GNU General Public License|GPL]] and written in [[C (programming language)|C]].

Despite the trust metric, posting privileges to the front page of Advogato were gained by controversial individuals, leading some to claim Advogato's trust metric solution was faulty.<ref>See the question "User Foo is certified but I think he's a moron ... doesn't that mean the trust metric is broken?" in the [https://web.archive.org/web/20170718151006/http://www.advogato.org/faq.html Advogato: FAQ]</ref>
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Misunderstanding of the purpose of Advogato's trust metric was common, which often led to the assumption that it should exclude specific individuals on the basis that they were known cranks.<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20170628190710/http://www.advogato.org/article/928.html Advogato: Advogato Has Failed<!-- Bot generated title -->]</ref>

== See also ==
*[[Everything2]]
*[[Kuro5hin]]
*[[Slashdot]]

== References ==
{{Reflist}}

==  Advogato and mod_virgule references ==
*Raph Levien (2004). [http://www.levien.com/thesis/compact.pdf Attack Resistant Trust Metrics].  Early draft of abandoned PhD manuscript.
*Raph Levien (2007). Lessons From Advogato [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KgqtU25dBI ('''video''')] [https://web.archive.org/web/20080828083725/http://video.vanhecke.info/lessons-from-advogato-on-reputation-systems/ ('''abstract''')].  Google Tech Talks, June 25, 2007.
*Jesse Ruderman (2004). [http://www.squarefree.com/trust/trust.pdf A comparison of two trust metrics].
*Mary Tyler (2004). [http://www.linux.com/feature/36497 Behind four Linux community sites]. Linux.com feature.
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20060818054733/http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/07/18/advogato/index.html Even better than Slashdot, Salon.com]
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20070720220401/http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/stewart1.pdf Social Forces and Constraint in the Attainment of Community Status]
*Steve Rainwater (maintainer of mod_virgule 2007 - 2016).

== External links ==
* {{Official website|http://www.advogato.org/}}
* Rusty Foster, 2004. '[http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/24/0502/96199 User Sponsorship and Managed Growth]'.  [[Kuro5hin]] article.
* modified codebase with backend PostgreSQL, currently seeking maintainer/new owner by Steven Rainwater '[https://web.archive.org/web/20181204211337/http://robots.net/]'
[[Category:Free software websites]]
[[Category:Reputation management]]
[[Category:Defunct social networking services]]
[[Category:Blog hosting services]]
[[Category:Internet properties established in 1999]]
[[Category:Internet properties disestablished in 2017]]