On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 10:39 AM, Philip Newton <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 16:29, Denny <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Mon, 2009-01-26 at 10:19 -0500, Emily Ravenwood wrote: >>> What happens when the maintainer of a community is inactive on the >>> service for a long time? >>> >>> What appears to be a standing LJ policy *on paper*, that a comm with >>> a long-inactive maintainer will have a new maintainer appointed >>> randomly from the members, has been put into practice on LJ and seems >>> to be occasioning some bad reactions. I have no idea how >>> "inactivity" was defined or what measures may have been taken to >>> contact the maintainer, all I saw was the notice that one chosen >>> member got. >> >> For IRC channels on freenode, it's possible to appoint a 'backup' >> channel owner, who gains control automagically if the main channel >> owner's account goes inactive (defined as 'not used for more than 90 >> days') and gets deleted. It might be good to have a 'fallback' >> maintainer setting on DW? > > You can already have multiple maintainers, so if you want to make sure > there'll be someone around if you drop off the face of the earth, you > can add a co-maintainer or twelve. > > I'm not sure whether giving someone maintainership automagically only > on inactivity of the community's maintainer -- but not before -- would > be useful. Presumably, the person who would "succeed" the maintainer > would be someone the original maintainer trusts, so they could become > a co-maintainer right away IMO.
Many communities can get along just fine without a maintainer until a troll or TOS violation comes up. That's the point where not having to wait for someone to notice a/the maintainer has had to "drop-dead" to LJ due to an attack of Real Life would be handy. Also depending on the community, a co-maintainer or replacement maintainer would not necessarily have to be someone who knows the original maintainer directly; they could be someone who simply has a vested interest in the subject matter of the comm. Example: UserA starts a community to promote and discuss their love of $gadgets. 20-30 people join the community, and it runs along for 2 years quite happily. TrollB joins the community and starts harassing people. Only now does anyone else in the comm notice that UserA stopped posting to their LJ four months ago because they graduated from college and doen't have regular internet access anymore. If UserA didn't designate anyone else as a co-maintainer, then someone has to contact LJ Support and say "hey, our maintainer is MIA and we've got a troll problem." Support could arbitrarily designate someone in the comm as the new maintainer. Under the scenario given by Denny, if UserA had set UserC up as co-maintainer or the "drop-dead" contact, as soon as the servers noticed that UserA hadn't [posted/logged in] in the last 90 days, comm maintainership would automatically transfer to UserC before TrollB shows up. UserA could be dropped from the maintainer list, but still be listed as a member, until such time as their account was active again. UserC could get an e-mail alert saying "Hey, we've noticed that the maintainer of the $gadget comm hasn't logged in during the last 90 days. We're giving you control of the community. If you're not interested, please designate someone else in the comm for this job." Clear as mud? Kristen _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
