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[oops, reposting -- I accidentally posted the first reply in lugnet.general]
A quick follow-up and then I have to go pack for NWBrickCon.
I love this role -- but it's very time-consuming. Consequently, whenever
I've walked in these shoes in the past, there's always been something that
I've dropped the ball on -- even back when I was doing it full-time. Going
forward, I want to put and end to that, and the best way that I can think of
is to as many delegate decisions and responsibilities as I can, and to
offload especially random daily incomings from my plate, and perhaps most
importantly to reduce the "truck factor" as much as possible.
Below are outlined two first steps toward this goal.
1. First, I'm entrusting the management of curatorships to Larry Pieniazek,
Frank Filz, and a third person whom Frank and Larry will either recruit or
choose soon. I've given Frank and Larry administrative privileges to edit
the curator access control lists, which define who in turn has editing
privileges for various areas of the newsgroup sidebars and so forth. An
advantage of having multiple meta-curators is, as Larry put it, in case one
gets podded by aliens and runs amok. When a third person is decided upon,
Larry and Frank will let me know and I'll give that person meta-curator
status as well.
One of the other first things I've asked Larry and Frank to do is to recruit
a small team of volunteers to manage all aspects of Cool LEGO Site of the
Week. Since the CLSotW pages are all FTX-based, access to this area can be
administered in the same way that curator access is administered. Tobbe
Arnesson I believe has already expressed interest in this. (Tobbe as you
may know has contributed many weeks of CLSotW reviews in the past.) An item
still on my plate is to allow the creation of auto-closing-date polls and to
fix the CLSotW content on the homepage to be either automatic or static.
This part will have to wait, however, until after NWBrickCon (unless I get a
chance to work on it from Grand Admiral Muffin Head's house :) .
If you would like to be a curator or co-curator of a particular area, please
post your request to lugnet.admin.curators and Larry, Frank, etc. will
address your request.
2. Second, sometime hopefully in the next month or two, Matthew Miller and
I are going to be transitioning LUGNET away from the FreeBSD setup at Pair
Networks and over to an all-Linux system[1] where we can administer
fine-grained accounts on the server and generally have much greater control
over the server box. Matthew is a fellow NELUG-er, friend, and co-worker at
Boston University (my day job), the creator and full-time project leader of
BU Linux <http://linux.bu.edu/>, and someone I think I can honestly say has
forgotten more about Linux than most sysadmins ever learn. Matthew has
offered to administer the server from a security, software installation, and
developer account standpoint. I've also spoken with Bill Ward and at least
one other who is definitely interested in helping from a Perl standpoint
(and other ways) when we get to the next step.
Finally, I've begun getting caught up on outstanding membership activations.
Actually, I *think* I'm all caught up, but please do write me if I've missed
you. It's my fault (not Suzanne's) that there haven't been any new
membership activations since August. I neglected to update the registration
details until earlier this week.
I think I'd also possibly like to grant admin-cancel privileges to one or
two other people, for cases when someone requests that an article of theirs
be cancelled. Currently, only Suzanne and I have privileges on the server
to do cancel/uncancel articles and I know that I've accidentally let several
requests slip between the cracks over the years. Same goes for password
resets.[2]
There are many various other day-to-day and week-to-week tasks that I'll be
considering looking for volunteers to help out with. I'll post more about
those as they occur to me in the weeks and months ahead.
--Todd
[1] If you have any suggestions regarding high-bandwidth, high-availability
Linux server hosting solutions, by all means please let me know. Basic
minimum requirements would be a 1GHz PIII or equivalent, 512MB RAM, a 30GB
hard drive, and 100 GB/month outgoing bandwidth. Budget is ~$200/month,
with some fudge. We had been considering ServerBeach for a while until we
learned of several substantiated reports this summer of SB catoring to
spammers.
[2] On the other hand, ultimately I think it would be best to eliminate
admin intervention entirely and simply allow you to do it directly yourself.
But allowing someone else to handle such requests is I think the right thing
to do in the short term.
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Message has 6 Replies:
 | | Re: admin change
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| Two things. First, a huge thank you to Suzanne for all the work you have done on this site. Along with a very small number of sites (Brickshelf in particular) Lugnet has helped turn us all from individual hobbyists into a true community. So we all (...) (21 years ago, 30-Sep-03, to lugnet.admin.general)
| | | Re: admin change
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| <<snipp> (...) Indeed. And that I have become. I have updated the subpages of CLSotW and awaits: (...) ...but as I have said before and still claim, there is no rush Todd! Do it when you have time, don't do Lugnet work on NWBrickCon unless you feel (...) (21 years ago, 1-Oct-03, to lugnet.admin.general)
| | | Re: admin change
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| <<snip>> (...) I can do this on GMT-time if the requests are posted to either a SPAM-free e-mail adress (yeah, right) or a newsgroup (don't know how this works since I have not needed it myself - *knock on wood*). <<snip>> (...) I'm afraid that (...) (21 years ago, 1-Oct-03, to lugnet.admin.general, lugnet.admin.curators)
| | | Re: admin change
|
| (...) For only $50/month you can have a colo box at (URL) but it wouldn't be able to be used for commercial endeavors. Since I think the only commercial aspect to Lugnet is the Amazon and similar links, that is probably OK. They also do hosting on (...) (21 years ago, 1-Oct-03, to lugnet.admin.general)
| | | Re: admin change
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| (...) We had this issue at BZPower and finally found a decent roost through a reseller named Easy Host Solutions. BZP has a dedicated Linux server which is just about keeping up (although the site is graphically much more intense than Lugnet, so (...) (21 years ago, 3-Oct-03, to lugnet.admin.general)
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