Minutes/2020-10-30

Present: JE, RL, TM

(Web)STUMP

TM reported that WebSTUMP has now been published on Savannah. Development environment instructions are available at Board:STUMP.

Now that both STUMP and WebSTUMP are on Savannah, it was agreed that RL would write to Igor Chudov to inform him of this and to invite him to sign up to Savannah and send us his username, in the event that he wants to be added as a maintainer.

It was agreed that the Board would first work towards a release that fixes the most pressing bugs, compatibility, and documentation issues, leaving any refactoring, restructuring, or new features for a future release.

JE mooted the idea of the Board selling STUMP service (as Igor Chudov once did), which would help lower the barrier to becoming a newsgroup moderator and also help cover the Board's own expenses. TM and RL expressed concern about the time commitment. There seems to be no technical/administrative reason why we couldn't run such a service from the Panix account, though it was noted that we haven't yet been successful in setting up a new STUMP instance for comp.ai (see below), and the code hasn't yet been audited for security issues. It was agreed to defer the matter until after we release new versions STUMP and WebSTUMP, at which time we can better determine the feasibility of the proposal from a technical and security standpoint.

Moderation

JE reported that he has not yet had a response from Dario re comp.os.linux.announce .

Re comp.ai , RL reported that STUMP is generating a rejection message to the approve address which gets caught in our spam filter. Presumably the submitter gets notified afterwards. RL to continue to investigate.

Kathy Morgan sent an e-mail to the Board asking if we are getting moderation notices for news.groups.proposals , the robomoderator for which is hosted by Jonathan Kamens. JE determined that we had not yet been added as moderators for this group and agreed to write to Jonathan to rectify this. Kathy also forwarded a recently rejected proposal to us, consideration of which was deferred to our next meeting.

Paul Schleck sent an e-mail to the Board notifying us of a dead link in our news.announce.important FAQ. TM to update the FAQ on Panix.

Publicity

TM reported that he has not yet done the press release but will do so for next week's meeting.

Infrastructure

JE reported that he's backed up the Panix account to the Board's own server. TM noted that according to Panix, "Your disk space is protected by our RAID fileserver with multiple daily snapshots of your directories and nightly tape backups," so this is another recovery option.