Minutes/2025-04-25

Present: RL, MM, TM

• Administration
  • comp.lang.asm.x86
    • RL replied James Harris's post to the MVI thread on news.groups.proposals. Ivo Gandolfo responded to offer hosting for moderation of this group. RL emailed Ivo and the three volunteers to coordinate setting up a moderation system.
  • news.groups.proposals
    • 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.
  • comp.compression.research
    • TM to post 2nd RFD.
  • Moderated groups without moderators
    • soc.genealogy.surnames.britain : no further update from volunteer
    • rec.humor.funny : No further communication from Brad Templeton.
    • No response to TM's reply to Ivan Shmakov, who had expressed interest in moderating several groups. TM to try contacting him by e-mail.
    • comp.binaries.cbm : RL wrote to the new moderator a couple days ago and is awaiting a response.
    • TM to draft the LCC for the mass deletion and circulate it to TM and MM for approval.
  • soc.sexuality.general (non-functioning moderated group): Agreed to defer until mass deletion RFD is concluded.
  • soc.culture.jewish.moderated
    • MM contacted the last known moderator, who confirmed that they now do not moderate the group or have access to the moderation mailbox. The ISC has updated the group aliases file to remove the non-working submission address. Agreed to defer any further action until the current mass deletion RFD is concluded.
• Infrastructure
  • Status of cron jobs for offsite backups: MM has tested connecting to the account via SSH and it works. 100 GB is available. RL is testing an e-mail backup script.
  • Various related server issues
    • Owing to the volume of automated notifications Mail in a Box is emitting about incompatible packages, MM argued for removing it and replacing it with standalone SMTP and IMAP servers.
    • MM noted that our OS could be updated.
    • Regarding the issue with mail.big-8.org, MM advocated decommissioning this domain rather than adding a mapping of mail.big-8.org to big-8.org addresses.
    • cron error messages relating to our unused Nextcloud instance are now getting through; RL has disabled these messages while MM investigates disabling or uninstalling the instance.
    • TM to update the OS.
  • RL to continue to investigate whether Apache can be configured to always use the most recent version of PHP, or to exclude PHP from automatic upgrades.
  • E-mail from GoDaddy indicating that a payment method had been removed from our account. TM logged in and found that a payment method from JE is still registered there and had been used as recently as last month. Most likely there were multiple methods of JE's registered with the account and JE removed only one of them. No action required for now; next payment is due in March 2027.
• 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
  • New donor on Open Collective. The Board considered sending a note of thanks but TM doesn't see any way of contacting them.
• Misc
  • Paul Schleck proposals: no further progress.