On May 27, 2009, at 1:47 PM, John Plocher wrote:
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.
I've helped manage and maintain CPAN for more than a decade and I know
a little bit about archives, John. Even with something as distributed
and mostly automated as that particular archive is, there remains a
constant stream of small administrative tasks that need doing in order
to keep it current and functioning.
You don't just turn something 'off' and expect that it will simply
remain the way it is for posterity in perpetuity. Consider the long-
forgotten http://www.opensolaris.org/sc/archives/ which I recently
updated but it is not maintained and I'm not sure very many even know
exists. Sure, it's an archive, but of what value?
The site will change over time and those archives will have to come
along for the ride as well as be maintained and managed to fit into
the schema.
It's not a lot of work, but considering we have plenty to do as it is,
it needs to be taken into consideration.
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.
This may be my day job, but I don't have to enjoy a group of folks
whose only apparent purpose is to make my mandate unpleasant. There
needs to be a well-defined policy so that we can manage the lists and
forums to the betterment of all services without having to worry if
there will be another round of hysteria over things that are not
necessarily up for public input.
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!
No, my job isn't to engage the community. I'm the sysadmin. My job is
to make things go and considering I have a mail system with ~395
mailing lists mostly completely out of our control in terms of
configuration, it may not come as a shock to you that I don't like
surprises, either.
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've observed a much more volatile sort of behaviour, but we'll leave
it at that.
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.
Not migrating is not deleting. Mis-information and such like this are
precisely what starts the downward spiral into the abyss of pointless
threads.
I have no idea where this content will go, but that's not my job,
either.
Perhaps the OGB should consider appointing an archivist, preferrably
someone with some interest and experience in archiving to help shape
the policy.
e.
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