[Balug-admin] I'd like to help

[Rick Moen]

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:

1.  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.


2.  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.)


3.  http://lists.balug.org/private.cgi/balug-talk-balug.org/2005-March/
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.



5.  Attempting to bring up the BALUG calendar 
(http://www.balug.org/index.php?module=PostCalendar&func=view&tplview=&viewtype=day&Date=20050326&pc_username=&pc_category=&pc_topic=&print=)
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


6.  BALUG's "next meeting" information's out of date.  I'd fix it if I
had access!  ;->