Poll closed as SP has decided to withdraw his interest
Not sure if the RFC thread is complete but this seems like an urgent matter so I’m doing it now. I think these polls are supposed to be public so we can root out gimmicks. Apologies if I am mistaken.
Poll question from this post:
More discussion here:
Seems sensible to me.
Preface: This post got pretty long but is actually the condensed and streamlined version–I could say more, much more, but for everyone’s sake I won’t.
Honestly guys, as I said before, I only very reluctantly volunteered to take on admin duties. And the things that have happened here in the last few days have made me feel really shitty.
First there were beetlejuice’s posts in the “RFC - Choosing new Admin” thread, the hearts those posts got, and the fact that nobody said anything on my behalf.
Then I got added to the “Captains” PM thread by Vict0ar. (Coincidentally right after 6ix posted a screenshot of one of my posts with a comment basically saying “it’s sad that they really believe this and aren’t gaslighting,”–thanks for that Vict0ar. Then tabbaker picked up the gaslighting talking point and dropped it in the “RFC - Choosing new Admin” thread, lovely.)
As I read through the PM thread I felt horrible, my stomach was clenching and I was practically shaking. All these posts, many by people I have chatted with and thought was cool with in various threads, saying all this heinous shit about other posters, the forum at large, the mods, the admins…
What it made clear to me (along with some other things) is that there are many posters here who can not or will not act like there is a real human being on the other side of the screen. And I’m asking myself, why should I offer up my precious time and energy to build a platform for these people?
It seems to me I have three options:
Jump into the fray and divert a bunch of my limited time and mental horsepower to really contribute and try hard to help make things better. I’ve tried this before and was unsuccessful.
Hang back, say nothing, and white knuckle it in hopes that things will get better. I’ve been trying this since my month off in March and it hasn’t helped at all (either with the forum or the amount of time I spend thinking about and feeling bad about the forum). Then, if/when I become admin, try to navigate what to do about the subforum proposal during a nearly full-blown forum civil war. (Sounds fun, huh?)
For the sake of my own self-esteem and my own self-respect, walk away and find something less personally harmful to do with my time.
Where I’m sitting right now I’m about 99% to do option 3. I guess some people will interpret this as some kind of ultimatum or demand for fealty, but really it’s just that I’m tired of having to fret about this place. And I don’t want to be a doormat who gets used by people who won’t even bother to show any trace of respect or kindness toward me and other posters.
I’m really sorry to the people who have expressed support in the various votes/polls and comments. And I’m sorry to the forum at large if this ends up causing trouble keeping the lights on. I just can’t see any way through this, so, barring a some sort of miracle fix, leaving is the only thing I can do.
Finally, this is a really hard decision for me, and it feels kind of rushed. But I thought I should make it before anybody is relying on me, or (god forbid) my name is on anything. I’ll hang around for a little while in case anyone wants to discuss this with me. After that, I’ll set my PMs to email me and log out.
This is very selfish of me because I like this site and want it to survive.
I hope you take over as admin and I hope you will see that role as being completely sterile, with no need to make any judgments about posters or moderation or literally anything other than keeping things running.
Would it make it more appealing if someone else were to have the actual login information, but then always PM’d you if something needed to be done? Like, I pay the server bills and it would make sense for me to have access to the server stuff. I just don’t know anything about it.
No idea if something like that is feasible.
That’s a gut punch, but I understand.
Not sure if @grue is willing to take this on, but if he isn’t and nobody else is, I can give it a shot. I will post my qualifications to run the server in hopes it will convince someone to not trust me with this and offer to help. Otherwise, jmakin will try to train me, and I will be 100% of the admin team.
Last summer I set up my own Discourse for fun. Took me forever because my internet connection was not stable enough and kept disconnecting me in the middle of the install, but eventually found Mosh and I think that solved my problems. So I’ve actually installed Discourse, got the mail set up and all the MX or CNAME or whatever records working, and was able to add/update plugins in the app.yml file and rebuild. I don’t remember how to do any of that and would not know how to fix it if anything went wrong, but I guess at least I’m not starting from scratch.
I have zero interest in doing this, and would prefer to not be an admin at all because it takes up way too much of my time these days, but I also don’t want this place to disappear so I’m committed to doing whatever I have to to keep it running
Like I said I will voluntarily take the admin role for a 6 month term if I have to/there are no other options, but I will do nothing with it, I won’t look at the DB, I won’t log into DO (I have a lot of experience with it), I will literally sit on the admin account password in my email or w/e. I don’t understand what adminning here does to take time? I mean traffic is low enough so that the hardware tier its on should cover everything easily. Thanks to the previous admins getting everything set up and all that of course.
I won’t be purging my precious ignore list however thats the price I ask for.
There are tons of requests to do adminy stuff lately (like more the past two weeks than the last 4 months combined). Until recently I’d been spending < 5 minutes a week, but it’s been about 5 hours this week. We don’t need anyone to be a Discourse admin to do anything unless I die and someone needs to be able to still access the admin panel.
In terms of server stuff, I don’t plan on installing updates unless necessary, but when I do, there is a non-zero change I break the forum and someone needs to rescue it. Or someone with experience could just spend an hour twice a year or however often we update and do it properly.
JFC you are amazing and this community sucks donkey testicles.
Did I mention (yes, I know I did) that today is my 14 day anniversary after my second dose and I cancelled all my plans to finally be able to go back in to the world today to deal with all this shit.
One of the nice things about DO is you can just take a snapshot and hit restore and its back up (with rollbacks, of course) in 1/2 hour so I wouldn’t even bother with like offsite mongodumps or whatever.
edit: if you have never done that, go do that immediately obv 
you can do it while its on.
So if I were to take a snapshot, update something or edit the app.yml file and break everything, and then hit restore, everything would be fine and then I could just send out the batsignal to you or @suzzer or someone to do it over without breaking it?
It’s just holding the keys for the most part, knowing where everything is, and being able to triage any issues that could arise. Like I said we are kind of low on memory. I’d recommend just upgrading the droplet to the $80/mo tier and this shit could be hands free for literally years.
I looked at discourse hosting, but for our views/month we would need to go to enterprise version and their pricing is opaque “let’s talk further about pricing.” Probably expensive as hell. That would solve a lot of problems though.
Guys, please could you make Vic feel included. I understand your feelings and so, but may be shared responsibility is not a bad thing here? And I believe that if he can make something useful for this forum instead of trolling he will. Please try to give him the opportunity.
I was just looking at that. The problem is while I can do things like copy and paste commands like
sudo shutdown -h now
Since they do not spoon feed what I need to do to start the droplet back up, the site would remain down forever at this point.
I cannot overstate how unqualified I am
Hmm so it doesn’t start up on its own when the droplet comes up? I mean yeah in that case you would just have to ssh in and run the startup commands but the state of the server and database would match when the snapshot was taken. You’d lose everything after that but its better than nothing and lets face it there’s no world changing stuff happening here.
