microbet brings this up sometimes and imo it is not practical for those roles to be completely divorced. The only reason we need a server admin is to support the forum, and you can’t do the server admin part very easily if you can’t also access the forum admin stuff. They’re effectively the same job.
What everybody is trying to work around isn’t a technical issue but a power one, and there’s no way to get around the fact that whoever has root access has total access to everything. Even if you’re locked out of the forum software you can take control right back from the command line.
Thanks very much for making this post. It has helped me feel much more comfortable about the situation.
I have a few reactions and thoughts of varying relevance, which I’ll intersperse below.
That’s good to hear, and I appreciate you being willing and able to hear this out in an objective and thoughtful way.
Muting stuff seems like it could work; I woke up fretting about the forum this morning and decided to mute the About Unstuck section… Didn’t happen obviously. If you do mute the About section, maybe consider putting the Help thread on Notify, in case there are trouble reports?
The bolded is a fantastic idea and in my thinking about this was something that I would want to have done as well. I thought the handoff process would be a great opportunity to take notes about everything involved that could be fleshed out into real documentation later.
One small thing, can we get ggoreo in here to confirm that he could keep things going if “something” happened?
I think the bolded is about all we can ask from people. I appreciate you being explicit about it too.
Thanks again for the post. I’m comfortable enough now to put my vote in.
The few things that haven’t already been mentioned here are very easy to document. I think people are envisioning things as far more complex than they really are. We run a stock Ubuntu distro and stock forum software with one minor change. In fact, it will be my parting advice to always track current releases and to not do any significant customization.
If the list is intended to be comprehensive, we could also possibly add the Google ads account (whatever it’s called, I remember Spidercrab mentioning it) and/or Amazon affiliate account (if still relevant).
Just to put out any ill-informed speculation before it happens. This is not a case where we had a big balance in the Google ad account, and now it’s gone, and a very sketchy @zikzak is claiming that Google stole it. That balance continues to be there on the account (I just logged in to check), it’s just been impossible for anyone to withdraw it.
I can assure you I have already repeatedly googled (and Bing’ed) “how do I contact a real human at AdSense to complain about not receiving the information they say they sent that they require I have before processing a payout even though they have already verified my identity, banking and tax information?”
Seeing that van reminds me of an art toy I had as a kid. Had totally forgotten it until now:
There were multiple plates, each with an outline of a section of a van (so there was a front, middle, and back). You would mix and match the sections in the frame and then rub over them with some paper to get the van picture.
