The End

Discussion of general topics about Seamonkey
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Frank Lion
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Re: The End

Post by Frank Lion »

tanstaafl wrote:The knowledge base looks like its in read-only mode...
Yep, it's been like that for well over a week now.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)
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winapp2
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Re: The End

Post by winapp2 »

I'll volunteer my effort as public information

I wrote to the OSL to call their attention to Frank Lion's questions posed to Jason, this is the response I received
Thanks for reaching out. We try not to get involved with communities directly in matters like this and try to stay as neutral as possible. However, I will say that we're willing to continue hosting it if:

1. Someone in the community (who Jason approves) is willing to maintain the website and it's components in the long term
2. They are responsive to requests from community members and any requests we have regarding their hosting
3. Works to get the site upgraded to the latest software so that it's not vulnerable to security issues and maintain it long term
4. Continued hosting doesn't increase our workload in the long term

But this is really up to Jason who has run the site all of these years and is willing to hand this over to someone in the community. The reality is, the current hardware is ancient and split between two iterations of a migration and isn't really being maintained by us anymore due to that. We were working on migrating the sites to a centrally OSL managed virtual machine, however Jason hasn't had much time to put in getting that going (which I can totally relate to).

Anyways, that's my $0.02.

--
Lance Albertson
Director
Oregon State University | Open Source Lab
Clearly the onus is upon Jason to facilitate these changes, which brings us back to Frank's second question. He was CC'd by Lance in the reply, so he's definitely aware of this route as an option.
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Frank Lion
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Re: The End

Post by Frank Lion »

Like most long unlocked Sticky threads, this thread has now reached the junk post 'quote a long post and add a sentence to it' stage and so it's easy to miss the useful stuff amongst all the dross. (guess the mods are all off getting drunk or something)



So, here's a couple of links to earlier posts here that I think people should read -

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... #p14846467

winapp2 is well known to people in the Firefox Builds forum as a former changelog keeper and the actual post is self-explanatory.

Now, on Page 4, there was a post that was easy to miss -

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... #p14845490

So, who exactly is this IanN? Well, aside from Ian Neal being a real life IT Technical Systems Consultant / Professional, he is also the main man on the SeaMonkey Council and is the SeaMonkey code module owner (all dev coding has to be approved by him)

https://www.seamonkey-project.org/about

In addition to being involved with SeaMonkey since 2004, Ian is also a Software Dev. for Mozilla since 2003, who has been contributing and reviewing code for products built off the Mozilla code base including Firefox, SeaMonkey and Thunderbird on a voluntary basis.

If required, IanN looks very suitable to be the Admin here.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke (attrib.)
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tanstaafl
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Re: The End

Post by tanstaafl »

I sent Kerz a email about Ian being a good candidate, that included a link to Franks post. In the past when I sent Kerz email about a problem with the forum or KB I rarely got a response, but he appeared to react to it.
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tanstaafl
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Re: The End

Post by tanstaafl »

There is a proposed plan (have Ian Neal replace Kerz as the sysadmin, and continue using free hosting at OSL) but nobody knows whether Kerz is receptive to that idea, and whether they have started to talk about it. Kerz's last post was on Sept 24 and we don't even know whether he read Frank's post suggesting Ian Neal as a replacement or the email I sent Kerz about that post. In the interim Kerz has made the KB wiki read-only (not a good sign).

To make things more complicated, Kerz was apparently in the midst of moving the web site from some old dedicated hardware (hosted at OSL) to a centrally OSL managed virtual machine. So if Ian replaced him the assumption is he wouldn't just keep things running, he'd have to resume the effort to move to a centrally OSL managed virtual machine (in order to keep the free hosting at OSL). That may be more work than he is willing to do.

The most useful posts are:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... #p14846486
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... #p14846532
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... #p14846467
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... #p14845952
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tanstaafl
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Re: The End

Post by tanstaafl »

I just sent a message to Ian Neal:

"Have you had any discussions with Kerz? Or did you lose interest?

If the roadblock is converting the existing forums on old dedicated machines to a OSL centrally managed virtual machine we'd prefer not to lose the ability to search/browse the old threads, but as long as Kerz archived them somewhere that's okay. Ditto for the wiki. As long as the wiki is archived editors such as myself could migrate/convert KB articles to whatever the replacement wiki is.

i.e. We could get by with a home that has brand new (empty) forums and a brand new (empty) wiki. Its the community that matters most"
IanN_MZ
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Re: The End

Post by IanN_MZ »

...and I have responded and I am still interested. Making contact with Kerz was on my to-do list this week (so thanks to tanstaafl for the prompt/work so far). My preference would be to keep the existing messages and wiki as well as the community together but that does depend on the upgrade routes available which I should be able to find out once I have access to the systems and information from OSL.
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tanstaafl
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Re: The End

Post by tanstaafl »

We're a unofficial/independent user community, not affiliated with Mozilla or Thunderbird. If we shut down (its looking less like we will given the very long delay, lack of any contact with the admin after Sept 24 and Ian Neal offering to replace the current admin) you can ask for help at

* The Thunderbird Support forum. It and the FireFox Support forum are the official support forums for Thunderbird and Firefox on the Mozilla Support web site (aka SUMO).
* The mozilla.support.thunderbird google group (limited usefulness due to low traffic, and has had problems with spam in the past)
* The Thunderbird category on Discourse (limited usefulness due to low traffic and fairly unknown)
* https://www.reddit.com/r/Thunderbird/ (limited usefulness due to low traffic)
* Questions on superuser tagged as Thunderbird (not a dedicated forum, but can be useful for advanced users)
* https://www.reddit.com/r/mozillazine/ (created by the admin as a potential replacement for these forums but essentially dead in the water)

See prior comments in this thread about why most users (in these forums) don't want to use those alternatives.
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