Re: forums.debian.net - who's in charge?
[ Responding to both Mez and Ganneff ]
On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 06:50:00PM +0100, Martin Meredith wrote:
>Nominally, I was put in charge a while back, as whoever was in charge
>of it at the time didn’t want to be involved any more, and there was
>a need for something to be done related to the software/server (I
>can’t quite remember) - which is where Joerg was involved.
>
>There was a LOT of controversy at the time, as I put in place a team
>of (volunteer, non DD) moderators and admins - some of the community
>decided that this was a restriction of their free speech, branded me
>a nazi, and split off to make their own “competitor” forums.
How "nice" of them. :-/
>I didn’t want to be particularly involved after all of that, and made
>this clear to the team and those involved. I did ask for assistance
>in various places at the time, but to no avail.
ACK, that matches my recollection as an outside observer at the
time. I understand your position, and it's a shame you didn't get more
help at the time... :-(
>I’ve voiced my opinion on multiple occasions that it should be taken
>down, or taken over by someone with the will to work on it, but
>whilst no ones been willing to step up and take it on, the general
>consensus was that it would be better to exist than to not.
Hmmm, Considering some of the complaints that we've had, I'm more
convinced of the opposite now.
>Last I left the forums, it was being led by a small team of admins
>and mods who cad proven themselves as competent and capable, and I
>had left them to manage this on their own, with a request to reach
>out to me if they needed assistance.
>
>The forums are a “community” forums, not official “Debian” forums, so
>it’s hard to lead - those who are toxic within the official community
>get dealt with via DAM or similar, but minuscule actions on the
>forums have previously led to “outcry” (threats of brigading
>complaints to DAM/DPL about me, for example).
>
>I honestly don’t think that the forum is worth it, and I think it
>would be safer if there were more DDs involved, rather than just the
>community.
Right.
On Mon, Mar 29, 2021 at 11:20:46PM +0200, Joerg Jaspert wrote:
>
>I *do* have admin access on the web part too, but I always said I won't use
>that for normal day-to-day forums stuff, only when required for machine
>maintenance works.
>
>So yeah, I have access, but I am not really interested in the user facing
>part of it. If someone (a team, possibly with tight connections to Debian, so
>contributor/project member?!) is, I am (and I think Martin too) are happy to
>hand out access on the web.
So I've been hoping that we might actually get some responses from the
existing community-based admins to this thread. Are any of them of the
teams@ email alias there?
As it stands, we're getting complaints elsewhere in Debian about toxic
behaviour and attitudes on the forums. Simply put, bad behaviour there
is hurting users and giving Debian a bad name. Neither of those are
acceptable for a service that many of our users believe is part of
(and run by) Debian.
If anybody has contact details for the existing admins, please ask
them to respond to me. If we don't get something sensible going *soon*
I'll have no choice but to ask DSA to remove the DNS for the service.
--
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK. steve@einval.com
"I've only once written 'SQL is my bitch' in a comment. But that code
is in use on a military site..." -- Simon Booth
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