Excellent points! I was thinking of posting a "to do"/wish list for balug-admin-balug.org@lists.balug.org matters. Since there's probably at least a bit of overlap, let me (hopefully fairly briefly) mention what I was thinking of:
To do / wish list items (not necessarily a complete list): Mailing lists - get the "old(er)" publicly accessible list archives back on-line. Consistent URLs - seems the URLs of the archives have bounced about a lot - they should be consistent, so older links work (directly or via redirect), and all the archives for a given list (and its replacement, and its replacement's replacement, ...) should be reasonably findable under a common URL or URL scheme. One of the things I noticed with some Google searching and peeking at Google cache last time the list broke ... apparently this recent episode isn't the first time the list has been broken and set up with a different list name and a different archive location (/URLs) ... get it together (literally, at least). The latest round of *replacement* list names are significantly longer e-mail addresses (both local part and domain) - we should carefully consider what they should be for the "permanent" e-mail addresses used for each list, and carefully work to get to that goal (e.g. balug-talk-balug.org@lists.balug.org is rather long, not-so-user-friendly and relatively redundant e-mail address for a BALUG talk list) The list archives should be public unless "we", as a group, by consensus (or at least plurality) decide they shouldn't be "public" (see also Rick's fine comments :-)) I think most of my other key points (key content on main BALUG page, BALUG calendar and its links/data, etc.) have been covered earlier by myself and/or others so I'll try to avoid being redundant on those points (they should also be findable in relatively recent archives).
Quoting Rick Moen rick@linuxmafia.com:
I'd be glad to help with the mailing list and Web site. I've been with BALUG since the beginning, and am an experienced Mailman listadmin and Linux sysadmin.
(One thing I'm bad at, so please don't ask: Lining up speakers.)
I've taken out an account on the wiki, and joined this list and the new incarnation of balug-talk on the "lists.balug.org" host. I'm reading docs on Postnuke.
Some concerns:
- balug-talk's archive has always been publicly accessible. Suddenly,
the new one isn't. Problems: (1) It's not what the membership has always wanted and expected, and (more primarily because) (2) a big part of the point of answering questions publicly is to advance the state of collective knowledge, e.g., by people finding the questions & answers via Web search.
My 2 cents: This change really shoots BALUG in the foot. Please un-do it ASAP.
- Host "lists.balug.org" doesn't accept mail to the postmaster account
as required by RFC2821 and numerous other SMTP standards. (Specifically, it 550-rejects such mail with a "user unknown" message.) This ensures that mail from BALUG will be (needlessly and avoidably) discarded or rejected as probable spam, _and_ denies members of the public to use of a required administrative contact in case there's something wrong.
(If this is something "dreamhost" screws up globally and is not under Michael's control, please just say so.)
has some mis-parsed entries in it, that appear to be fragments of prior years' mails to balug-talk. This is almost certainly fixable, but will require command-line access (to edit the mbox file) and ability to regenerate the Pipermail archive.
To see what I'm talking about, look at the 15 entries marked "No subject".
4 As always, CABAL appreciates the calendar link from the BALUG front page to CABAL events. However, there's no "Sat, March 26 2005" CABAL event. Because of the desire to help out SVLUG and to avoid Easter weekend, CABAL's second meeting of the month was this _past_ Saturday, the 19th.
- Attempting to bring up the BALUG calendar
(http://www.balug.org/index.php?module=PostCalendar&func=view&tplview...)
shows this at the top of the page:
Warning: Smarty error: problem creating directory
"modules/PostCalendar/pntemplates/cache/dad8523a2e18f1929871d45a6df8aac5/%%164/%%1643473877"
in
/home/.bluebellblender/miamlh1/balug.org/modules/PostCalendar/pnincludes/Smarty/Smarty.class.php
on line 589
- BALUG's "next meeting" information's out of date. I'd fix it if I
had access! ;->