Administrivia about list and website continuity. 1) I have managed dirvish.org/com since jw schultz died, more than a decade. Many individuals and organizations have found dirvish useful. Managing the website and the list was one way to say "thank you" to the free/open-source software community, which has given me so much over the years.
My neurologist tells me that I may be in the first stages of cognitive decline, and that I should pass important responsibilities on to others. I am also participating in some cutting edge research to cure the disease, but that is another responsibility I must make time for. So, I hope some of you can decide what happens next with the website and the mailing list. The website is plain vanilla HTML. The wiki is moinmoin (python). The mailing list uses mailman (also python). The maintenance is almost trivial, except for items like (2). Let's discuss this. There are 181 names on the mailing list, including some long time contributors. While any responsible person with a website and some skills can continue this, I would like some community discussion and consensus before passing control to another. Please keep it civil. If you are eager to take over, but the community chooses another, please help that other person. Your chance will come. 2) 181 people are bound to include some troublesome ones. On August 11, 2015 someone reported my IP address to the Realtime Blackhole List. I was not notified. I am still investigating this. The mail logs are on an old, rotated out dirvish backup drive which resists mounting. I will share more information when I have it, but occasional nonsense like this is the real cost of operating the list. Nothing shows up on the list archives, http://www.dirvish.org/pipermail/dirvish/2015-August/date.html Over the years, a few spammers have signed up, and I kick them out as soon as I notice. Sometimes they manage to post a spam or two to the list. If this is intolerable to you, please do not sign up for mailing lists. If your spam detection system automatically sends its results to RBL, please do not sign up for mailing lists. When I find out who did this, I will remove them from the dirvish list, as a favor to the next person who administers it. That person can reinstate the person removed if they choose. Please support their decisions, or help them implement better procedures. My guess is that this event was pure malicious vandalism by someone besides us. Anybody can report anything they want to the RBL, a "guilty until proven innocent" operation (it took four emails to get the dirvish server off that list). There are so many wonderful and helpful people here, it is difficult to imagine that any of us could be so thoughtless. 3) I'll close by saying you are an awesome group of people. It has been a joyful inspiration to help others with you. Never stop helping others. We are why F/OSS works. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com _______________________________________________ Dirvish mailing list Dirvish@dirvish.org http://www.dirvish.org/mailman/listinfo/dirvish
