Minutes/2022-08-19
From Usenet Big-8 Management Board
Present: TM, JE, RL
- Administration
- comp.os.linux.announce
- No response from ISC re change in moderator. TM to ping ISC.
- rec.radio.amateur.moderated and rec.radio.info are seeking additional moderators, per tbgvf3$n4$1@reader2.panix.com . Not (presently) an issue for the Board, since the existing moderators can handle things, but it was agreed to note the call in the minutes in order to help spread the word.
- comp.os.linux.announce
- Misc
- Meeting with other hierarchy admins (minutes below)
- Michael of the de.* hierarchy has RSVP'd for the meeting on 19 August 2022 at 19:00 CEST.
- Meeting with other hierarchy admins (minutes below)
Present: TM, JE, RL, Jean-Daniel Dodin (fr.*), Michael Ottenbruch (de.*)
- Members of the various Boards introduced themselves
- JE asked Jean-Daniel and Michael about the current workload of the fr.* and de* Boards
- Jean-Daniel reports that not much activity on fr.*, and that it's easier to create groups than to delete them
- Michael reports that most admin work lately has been the work of one Board member who is doing a lot of RFDs for deletion, but none for creation
- JE asked whether the other hierarchies have problems getting their control messages acted upon by news servers
- Michael says that most traffic for de.* (80%) goes through a Berlin university, which has many former board members, and they do pay attention to control messages. However, the de.* key is old. The de.* Board is thinking about creating a new one but is afraid to do so and transition to it due to fears about servers running effectively on autopilot failing to handle it.
- JE explained that the Big-8 Board had the same problem and recently created a new key. Control messages are now being signed by both keys.
- JE mentioned that Julien Élie, a maintainer of INN, could help ensure that INN works with both old and new GPG keys. Julien wanted to attend today's meeting but contact was lost.
- TM said that either server software needs to support both old and new GPG keys, or else everyone (server software and hierarchy management boards) needs to transition to new keys at the same time.
- Jean-Daniel reported that he run a server on openSUSE and has no problem with both old and new keys. He has a web page documenting the configuration and use of INN.
- JE asked if the de.* and fr.* hierarchies have any moderated groups?
- Jean-Daniel says that there are no moderated groups on fr.*. Users of fr.* prefer to offload spam filtering to the individual news servers. There is an individual who publishes lists of French news servers, annotated according to what sort of filtering they perform. Besides this, many long-term French users are also proficient at client-side filtering.
- Michael reports that de.* has less than ten moderated groups. One member of the de.* Board has been polling the moderators and taking over moderation where necessary. (Currently he has assumed moderation of about half of the moderated groups.) With respect to the server-side model of fr.*, German users generally don't want servers to filter content.
- Michael reported that the other de.* admins were interested in attending the meeting but were unable to do so due to holidays.
- It was agreed to organize another meeting in a few months, when more people could participate.
