On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 10:00 AM, Elaine Ashton <[email protected]> wrote:
> There is no such thing as a completely maint-free archive.


Maybe not, but you can get pretty darn close.  Jim's (both of them :-)
suggestions of turning off the mailing lists and tagging the pages as
[Stale/Archived] as a means of putting something into an archived
state /is/ a little bit of maintenance work, granted.  Once that is
done, where do you see any additional "because it is an archive"
maintenance needed?

I'm explicitly not factoring out backups, disk mirroring, database
migration and the like as reasons to not archive things - those tasks
are part and parcel of hosting a community site and don't ever go
away.


>>> There needs to be a firm policy with people willing and able to do the
>>> job without being hobbled by the fear or encumbrance of having to take
>>> every action to a committee.

> Well, let me put it this way....as the person who gets the bile when the
> infrastructure doesn't work and no notice if it does work, the hysteria over
> the removal of the mailing list wildcards has left me a bit less than
> enthusiastic about anything that comes with the 'community' contingency and
> I doubt I'm alone in that particular pavlovian evasion.

And your negative attitude is showing pretty clearly, to the detriment
of all of us.

> People need to be able to do the job without the fear that one small change
> will cause an angry mob to march them to the gallows.

Part of the job is to engage the community (aka your users)
proactively in the conversations you are having before they result in
decisions and changes - your customers don't like surprises!

One small change that surprises people is very different from one
small change that people know is coming.   It isn't the change - it is
the surprise that incites angry mobs.

> I don't believe Jim said anything about deleting content yet, already, the
> hysteria has begun.

Read his words again - he has indeed mentioned deleting (or, more
precisely, not migrating) content to the new XWiki app.

> Making a policy at all would be a terrific start but, again, I suspect
> talking it to death and arguing the minutiae seems to be de rigueur for
> these sorts of things, from what I've observed, which doesn't give me much
> hope that it will come soon, if at all and I'm very interested in getting
> this mess of groups and lists into some sort of manageable format.

So, help us all out.  What does "manageable format" look, taste and
smell like to *you*?

  -John
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