Minutes/2020-08-14

Present: TM, RL, JE

Admin

The meeting adopted TM's draft announcement for news.announce.newgroups about the Board's new website and the availability of our meeting minutes. TM to post the announcement.

STUMP

Owen Rees posted an article on news.admin.moderation indicating that he had been independently fixing the (Web)STUMP instances used for the uk.* hierarchy and inquiring about the Board's GitHub repositories. JE and TM had replied explaining the situation and inviting him to collaborate with us once we had settled things with GNU.

TM reported that John Darrington of GNU has confirmed that STUMP and WebSTUMP are GNU packages, that if the Board members wish to take over maintenance, this should be done in individual capacities, and that the packages would need to be hosted somewhere that met GNU's criteria (though maintaining mirrors elsewhere would be acceptable). TM to tell GNU that we (i.e., TM, JE, and RL as individuals) are willing and able to take over maintenance and that we will move the primary hosting to Savannah. TM already has a Savannah account; JE and RL to create accounts of their own and inform TM of the usernames. RL to set up the packages on Savannah once TM gets final confirmation from GNU that we have been accepted as maintainers. Thereafter we will need to work on bringing the packages into compliance with the GNU guidelines.

The Board received an e-mail from Jonathan Kamens indicating that the DNS for ngp.big-8.org is no longer a CNAME for email.kamens.us, with the result that submissions to news.groups.proposals are failing. JE has fixed this and will try to find out Jonathan Kamens and not the Board are hosting the moderation software for this group.

JE reported on some discrepancies between the list of moderated newsgroups we received from Todd M. McComb and the canonical list of newsgroups from ISC. Resolving these discrepancies is a prerequisite for any future removal of dead groups. JE to ask Todd/ISC about this, and for a full list of moderator addresses. JE to find a list of newsgroup charters.

Regarding our plans to take over moderation of comp.ai , RL to ask Paul Schleck to take a look at our procmailrc for adding a new robomoderator instance.

TM raised the question of whether we need to continue hosting our moderation software on Panix. RL observed that Panix seems to support Usenet very well. It was agreed to revisit the matter only if it turns out that we need to pay for extra moderation accounts.

Wiki

JE is continuing work on his netiquette tutorial with the help of past RFCs and primers.

TM reported no progress yet on the survey of Board policies due to ongoing work on STUMP.