Minutes/2023-06-16

Present: TM, RL

• Administration
  • Bill Horne of comp.dcom.telcom , who has found a new moderator, indicates that the moderator address should stay the same. RL to advise him that, per Moderated Newsgroups#How does a group change moderators?, simply informing the ISC of the change in moderator is sufficient. However, TM thought it would help for the Board to also publicize the change in moderators on Usenet, as it has historically done. RL to ask Bill if he'd like us to do this.
• Infrastructure
• (Web)STUMP
  • Documentation updates:
    • RL has been updating the (Web)STUMP documentation. In the absence of a response from JE, RL is assuming that the Markdown version of the documentation, which was apparently generated by JE from the HTML version, was intended to be the new master copy.
    • We have received suggestions concerning the documentation from Paul Schleck. RL has acted upon these by starting an FAQ.
    • In surveying the existing documentation, RL found a design rationale document by Igor Chudov, which may be of little interest to users. It was agreed to keep this but to prefacing it with a note that it's retained for historical reasons and/or for the use of (Web)STUMP developers.
  • RL suggested it would be useful to mark issues in the bug tracker as targetting a specific release. Savannah has support for such extra field; RL to determine which of these we should use.
  • RL noted that the "Download" links on the Savannah project pages for STUMP and WebSTUMP currently point nowhere. It was agreed to upload tarballs of the latest release to Savannah's hosting, but there was some confusion as to how to handle tarball signing. (That is, should we use a dedicated signing key, or our individual keys?)e TM to ask on the GNU maintainers mailing list about GPG signing best practices.
• Publicity
  • No response yet from Liam Proven to TM's latest message. TM to ping him.
  • RL asked about web gateways to Usenet that we might document on our wiki or direct enquirers to.
    • RL noted that electrondepot.com seems to be a Usenet gateway, with full read/write access, for a small subset of newsgroups. There's no indication of who is running it and why, though its Terms of Reference clearly disclose that it is a Usenet gateway.
    • RL noted Narkive, a one-man operation that archives Usenet posts. RL seems to remember it once having a posting ability for registered users.