Consider policy on using developers to set up complex censor rules

[RichardTaylor]

This would be an internal policy.

Often to make censor rules work on PDFs one needs to download them, uncompress them, and find the "code" for the text in question to be censored.

Sometimes the situation is even more complex:

https://wdtkwiki.mysociety.org/wiki/Editing_requests

Historically protecting developer's time has been paramount, but this position may well be different now and it may be appropriate to spend a bit of developer time on tasks such as this to save others' time.

[gbp]

I have been working tooling to speed up complex censor rules. In the last month I have got it down to a single one line command even in the most complex cases I've seen.

Not yet integrate at all with Alaveteli but can envision being able to use existing plain text censor rules and apply these to PDFs without the need to create any complex rules.

For now happy to continue with requests to the dev@ list especially as its much quicker for me to do this now.

[garethrees]

it may be appropriate to spend a bit of developer time on tasks such as this to save others' time

WDTK admins are always welcome to request assistance from dev@ for this kind of quite technical assistance. Of course, the more people can do themselves the better, so I'd still encourage admins to go outside of their comfort zone and give it a try so that at least the questions will be a bit more advanced than an outright delegation of work.

Historically protecting developer's time has been paramount

We do have limited capacity, but we also value our volunteers' and other staff time. It's all a balance.

[RichardTaylor]

Policy on the wiki updated to say:

Cases requiring complex censor rules may be referred to dev@ as developers may be able to act in a more efficient manner than others. See discussion on Github.