Minutes/2024-12-06

Present: TM, MM

Administration
- rec.arts.comics.reviews and rec.arts.comics.info
  - No further activity on the RFD. Agreed to decide at next meeting (with RL) whether to proceed with a deletion vote.
- comp.sys.wearables
  - No response yet from Greg Pfeil to RL's offer of 2024-11-15 to (temporarily) host a STUMP installation for the group, pending setup of his own moderation system.
- comp.protocols.dns.bind
  - Last contact from Dan Mahoney on 2024-10-26. Agreed to defer consideration a while longer.
- rec.radio.broadcasting
  - Last contact from Jay Henning on 2024-10-31. RL was to have written again to indicate that the Board will proceed with its vote if no meaningful progress on moderation is made by 2024-12-06. Agreed to defer pending an update from RL.
- comp.os.plan9
  - TM has been corresponding with Anthony about publicizing the change in moderatorship. Awaiting an update from Anthony before closing the MVI.
- comp.lang.asm.x86
  - No further activity on the MVI since 2024-11-01, and last contact with Terje Mathisen on 2024-10-18. RL to have written to Terje Mathisen and encourage him to get in touch with the other volunteers. Agreed to defer pending an update from RL.
- news.groups.proposals
  - RL has set up STUMP accounts for MM and TM.
  - The group's signing key uses the e-mail address ngp-approval-key@ngp.big-8.org. Agreed to leave this as-is for now, as this is just an identifier. We can later consider adding a new identity with a new address, and/or upgrading to a GPGv2 key.
- news.newusers.questions and news.announce.newusers
  - RL has set up STUMP accounts for MM and TM.
- Moderated groups without moderators
  - MM noted that the submission address for comp.compression.research (at albasani.net, whose registrant passed away) is no longer working. Agreed that we would consider an MVI in the near future. TM wrote to the current moderator, Niels Fröhling, who responded that the group was already "pretty much dead" by 2010 and that "the research community in general is not really what it was in the 90s". He doesn't think he can moderate it nowadays and thinks that removing the group is probably the best course of action. Agreed that TM would prepare a group removal RFD.
  - MM noted that there are a further 140 moderated groups with a submission address set to mod-bounce.no-mod-info@isc.org. Agreed that MM would review past mass removals and report on the procedure.
- misc.test.moderated
  - MM noticed that the submission address is on Jonathan Kamens's decommissioned server.
  - TM wrote to JK who replied with a link to his mod-relay Ansible repository. This has everything needed to set it back up on any of the relay servers; JK suggests each of them should run their own auto-responder for the group, rather than having the group depend on a specific relay server.
  - MM expressed concern about running JK's auto-responder as-is as it could be used to flood individual e-mail accounts (by repeatedly submitting articles with a forged From header).
  - TM observed that if the group's only purpose is to verify that their news server knows how to route submissions properly to moderated newsgroups, then perhaps the moderation software could simply post the submission to the group (perhaps with a prepended message indicating that the article passed through the moderation relay) rather than send an e-mail acknowledgement. TM to write to JK to confirm this.
Infrastructure
- Awaiting update from RL on whether he can join our empty Jitsi room after authenticating.
- MM reports that his moderation relay is active with the ISC and is processing submissions.
- Status of cron jobs for offsite backups: Awaiting update from RL.
- Status of remote monitoring: No further progress by MM.
Software/funding
- TM: No update yet on GPG signing best practices on Savannah
- Thunderbird 128 contact deferred given Julien's comments on INN.
- TM still to respond to Julien.
- OTF IFF/NGI0/Sovereign Tech Fund: no further updates
Misc
- Paul Schleck proposals: no further progress.