Minutes/2020-11-20
From Usenet Big-8 Management Board
Present: JE, RL, TM
- Publicity
- Press release on the reconstituted Board and its activities has been finalized. List of press contacts at Board:Campaigns to be expanded by JE to include audio-visual venues. On Tuesday, TM to publish the press release on the wiki, and Board members to initiate contacts per their assignments Board:Campaigns.
- Administration
- E-mail from Kathy Morgan (2020-05-15) re removal of comp.software.shareware.announce
, comp.software.shareware.authors , comp.software.shareware.users , and misc.writing.screenplays.moderated : agreed to defer consideration until next week to allow time to review the status of the groups and the relevant policies and procedures. - E-mail from Jonathan Kamens (2020-11-14) re e-mail routing for news.groups.proposals: agreed to tell Jonathan to forward rejection messages to the main moderator address (i.e., the Google Group).
- TM reported that he's continuing to correspond with Tim Skirvin about his roles on the Technical Team
- Re e-mail routing for news.announce.important and news.admin.moderation, TM reported that while he had removed old moderators from our .procmailrc and WebSTUMP configuration files, STUMP itself was still sending mail to the old moderators. RL to remove these moderators from the procmailrc scripts in the individual STUMP installations on Panix.
- Re comp.ai , RL has got things working and just needs to do some minor configuration. For this TM to set up a website for the group. RL to replace references to the obsolete STUMP support link.
- Re comp.os.linux.announce , JE reported that he is awaiting further communication from Dario.
- Re the proposed PC audio group, EJE reported that he is awaiting a response from the proposer.
- E-mail from Kathy Morgan (2020-05-15) re removal of comp.software.shareware.announce
- Wiki
- TM reported that he upgraded MediaWiki from 1.34.2 to 1.34.3 (security release) to 1.34.4 (maintenance releases) and the associated extensions and skins. MediaWiki 1.35 is available but depends on a version of PHP that isn't available on our Ubuntu 18.04 (LTS) system. It was agreed to stay on the MediaWiki 1.34.x branch as long as security fixes continue to be backported or until we can move to the next LTS release of Ubuntu.
- E-mail from Bill Horne (2020-07-25) including a list of updates and corrections to our Newsreaders article, and a same-day reply from Kathy Morgan. TM noted that Wikipedia also has a List of Usenet newsreaders and suggested that we might consider either (a) using it as a further source of information for our own wiki's article, or (b) redirecting our own article to the one on Wikipedia. (In either case, Bill Horne's changes and corrections to be merged in where appropriate.) It was agreed that JE would decide on the best course of action and to carry it out.
- TM proposed relicensing our wiki (currently under the non-free CC BY-NC-SA) to CC BY-SA. The advantages are (a) allowing us to more easily to merge material from Wikipedia and other free content sources, and (b) allowing others to more easily reuse our material, which furthers our ideal of fostering use of and public interest in Usenet. The disadvantage is that we would need to past contributors to our wiki to relicence their contributions, or failing that, to remove or rewrite them. It was agreed that we would seek to relicence the material under CC BY-SA and that TM would contact the past contributors to ask for permission.
- (Web)STUMP
- JE reported that STUMP and WebSTUMP were forked years ago for use with the uk.* hierarchies and are currently somewhat still being developed. JE has e-mailed the fork's maintainer with a view to collaborating and is awaiting a response.
