[gopher] Gopher Community Infrastructure...

Wed Aug 9 07:05:38 UTC 2017

@Brad: I don't mean to be rude; but can you give us a TL;DR of your post?
Seriously Nobody has time to read an "essay". We all have real jobs (at
least I think we do?). Also I'm a blind guy and your post is way too ranty
and long.

What are we trying to solve here?

James Mills / prologic

E: prologic at shortcircuit.net.au
W: prologic.shortcircuit.net.au

On Tue, Aug 8, 2017 at 10:51 PM, Bradley D. Thornton <Bradley at northtech.us>
wrote:

> Mailing List, Newsgroup, etc...
>
> Hm... Okay here's my buck twenty seven:
>
> I'd like to get this out of the way first. Cameron, Christoph, Kim, Ray,
> and myself - these are people I know to be capable and qualified to
> administer and maintain resources with respect to our community. I'll get
> back to that later, and no, I'm not going to "Vote", and I'm not going to
> throw my hat into hosting or administering "Yet another" mail list as a
> community volunteer, in case of any questions that arise from my
> suggestions and recommendations below.
>
> Moving along...
>
> People are talking about a 'vote', and there's been no real 'discussion'
> about infrastructure, other than four people previously saying that to some
> degree they could, would like, or are willing to if no one else... You get
> the idea.
>
> I don't really like the democratic approach - it didn't work for the
> Athenians, they had to elect Tyrants every so often in order to fix things,
> and having seen what it can do to a musical project (bands), I find it to
> be a very divisive formula. i.e., just try to make that song work when
> three people 'voted' to perform it live while the guy/girl who  hated it
> was the one voting against it.
>
> Exercises in a knee jerk Democratic process often leaves some significant
> majority feeling slighted, because perhaps they felt strongly opposed to an
> idea that was pushed through hastily without even the comment/input period
> to let everyone breath and contemplate, or maybe they just were adamantly
> opposed and now they feel like they're the odd man out, a bit
> disenfranchised even.
>
> Representative democracy works for me in some situations - especially
> larger communities where the whole mess of a democratic system would find
> that ship in irons, drifting aimlessly in the current. And democracy does
> that, while representative democracy allows the face saving feature of all
> constituents involved to place their confidence in representatives to
> govern on their behalf, all the while conveniently offering a scape goat
> for their lamentations if one of their representatives supports a
> particular issue unpopular with them.
>
> Consensus - I love consensus building, because it takes time, and allows
> everyone that time to reflect on just how a decision might have far
> reaching impact for the group. To me, in a small group or "Band", if you
> will, consensus means that when five people decide upon something, everyone
> agrees to go along with it, for the betterment of the community, even if
> they don't really like it. i.e., four bandmates love and want to do the
> song - if bandmate five hates it, the matter is taken off the table for the
> time being, if bandmate five isn't feeling the love, but wants to defer to
> everyone else for the sake of koombaya, then no one feels as if their
> feelings were marginalized.
>
> What I would like to see here is consenus. I see a few ideas that on the
> surface, appear to be incongruent, Usenet verses an email list, etc. But
> they're not.
>
> So before jumping onto a bandwagon of finding a better mousetrap, I think
> it's best, as is the case in almost all matters of systems analysis, to
> identify the current 'system', before looking at the feasibility and costs
> incurred for a new 'system'.
>
> What currently exists? Well for one thing, a few folks here have mentioned
> creating a new newsgroup, or using the existing newsgroup. Certainly, I
> don't believe that yet another newsgroup (there's actually more) would be
> of any benefit, and as diluted and marginalized as it has become, why we
> would want to place yet another hurdle in place for a n00b, or a passive
> bystander, or tech fan, to observe or participate.
>
> If people wish to use and communicate on one of the existing newsgroups...
>
> gmane.network.gopher.general, comp.infosystems.gopher, and I'm sure
> there's one under 'alt.' as well, then those are already in place. In fact,
> some folks use gmane to post to this list, a list which has archives going
> back 17 years to 2000.
>
> Now What about Gmane (and perhaps other discussion archive systems that
> may be picking up from this list)? I believe that continuity is of
> paramount significance, and many people here have spent a lot of time
> keeping track of the lineage and history and digging up and maintaining
> archives pertaining to Gopher. There's no reason why a breakage with gmane
> will need to occur.
>
> Mail lists - this mailing list isn't actually all that easy to find. It's
> not hard if you look, but it's a big hassle to join and participate on.
> John, announced his retirement a few years back, even handed off
> OfflineIMAP and other projects, no longer maintains any Debian packages
> that I know of, and if I'm not mistaken this list seems to have the
> moderation bit turned on for all new subscribers - that's very bad in my
> not so humble opinion....
>
> Sure, if you're going to take a Laissez-faire attitude, and be an admin in
> absentia, like John has become, then it certainly reduces the amount of
> admin time required, all the bounces from spambots posting to the list
> requiring rejection, etc., but there are active folks here, and the Alioth
> admins are there for us to contact if we're having a problem - I don't know
> if they're going to want someone with Debian dev privs to become a
> listadmin, or if any schmoe would be fine as long as we agree to support
> that person as admin.
>
> The list is slow - not the slowest, I'm on a LUG that appears to take over
> 8hrs to resend posts sometimes, and that is excruciating. I currently still
> run and host about 50 (nice and snappy) lists myself, so I'm not interested
> in doing it myself, although I'm going to offer to contribute otherwise -
> more on that later too.
>
> This list is in debian.org - and that is worthy of some mention. There
> are implications, or at least,  assumptions, that come with respect to the
> association of the list with the Debian.org domain. It's not an
> endorsement, nor an indication of any project associations, but it's a bit
> worthy of mention. Something like our community's gopher discussion list
> hosted on suckless or ratthing or even floodgap is technically only a
> matter of the characters in the string, but Debian is already associated
> some level of quality branding with connotations of institutional heritage
> - the other domains, not so much. No offense.
>
> Right now, the list exists in the form of a syndication to gmane, more
> notably, is hosted under the debian.com domain, and there's
> comp.infosystems.gopher too (but that is separate and not connected at this
> time) - the newsgroup is not going anywhere and it's there in case anyone
> uses it.
>
> The problem with the moderation bit (if that's what  it is)? someone needs
> to check it everyday for new signups and attempted posts. I don't know that
> I've been asked to set that more than once or twice, an open list doesn't
> need that but perhaps in John's thinking he wasn't going to be around...
> IIRC, you had to join, and then attempt one post, then John would take your
> moderation bit off... if the lights are on and nobody's home that's not a
> good thing.
>
> So first, I do think that someone here should be chosen to contact the
> alioth admins, and ask about their official process for changing/adding new
> list admins. It's really just one checkbox.
>
> If there have been questions about how responsive the list server is, this
> is actually something that I might consider in whether I would support a
> move to another host.
>
> Mailman: I like Mailman. It's a good list server. If it wasn't, it
> wouldn't be just the good looking GUI that makes it so popular ;)
>
> Now, to move, means to encumber the list to a different provider. Were it
> one of us or some other third party under our collective contribution to
> the effort. There are people here (Just about everyone who is listed in
> Wikipedia is here) whose contributions to the gopher community are
> profound, and I would feel much better about entertaining the relocation of
> the list to another host if the hostname was a self-bootstrapped identify
> registered by, and hosted by the community itself - through a particular
> member/participant or a contracted third party.
>
> I would volunteer a domain registration in perpetuity, in the name of some
> 'Gopher' named entity (The Gopher collective, International Gopher Rescue,
> Mighty Gopher birds). We would have to come up with a brand registration -
> something with a short string, that is relevant, and unambiguous sounding
> when spoken. Something with the word GOPHER in it - and the list would live
> there.
>
> Now regardless of where the DNS would point... The MX RR could in fact
> still point to the very same list server but that's not relevant to the
> discussion here even if we decided to go for a different hostname for the
> mail server.
>
> Then we would need a server. Cameron said it was not beyond the realm of
> possibility for him, but that he wasn't looking forward to something like
> that, and no reason he should. Christoph tossed his hat right into the
> ring, and we obviously need and should have more than one admin, while Kim
> leaves bases loaded with Ray up to bat - yes that is quite a capable
> custodial crew.
>
> Whether or not a decision to move off of Alioth occurs, there is no reason
> why, with the appropriate amount of admin intervention, we shouldn't be
> able to preserve the archives in a linear way, and maintain the existing
> gateways - even adding comp.infosystems.gopher into the current mix (which
> should satisfy those who enjoy working with their newsfeeds).
>
> "An do no harm." I had a kooky girlfriend who used to say that. It's kind
> of a credo of sysadmins - never leave a system with something you broke lol.
>
> Something MUST be done about the problems with subscriptions to the list,
> but I know that it can be addressed with the server administrators, and if
> even if we don't move the list at this time, I'm pretty adamant about us
> needing more than one administrative point of control so this doesn't
> happen again.
>
>
> If I 'were' to propose anything, and I'm not, I would propose we get a
> domain, come up with a name for the group as an entity to promote the
> production value and relevance of gopher protocol, and between a few of us,
> pick up a dirt cheap little VPS  for some things, with an MX RR pointing to
> ratthing or suckless SMTP servers... for example.
>
> GC is workable, so is EC2, so are low end providers which are often a much
> better way to go.
>
> Regardless, Administration of the list needs to be addressed at the very
> worst case scenario, since the subscribers to the list could be migrated to
> a new listserv. Admins aren't moderators, and this list is self-moderating
> anyway due to the tight-nit nature of the community, so the only real
> functions would be to stave off bots and reject/block stuff like that.
>
> Well I think that was about twenty nine cents right there. Two cents over
> budget, so I'll leave off there and encourage any suggestions and ideas,
> which I enthusiastically look forward to.
>
> --
> Bradley D. Thornton
> Manager Network Services
> http://NorthTech.US
> TEL: +1.310.421.8268
>
>
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