If you haven’t heard, I am stepping down for a while. May not be permanent. @SensiblePerson has volunteered for the role and he has my full endorsement. He has volunteered for July 2021 ending in Jan 2022. This buys us time we need right now.
In this RFC I propose that to elect a new admin, he or she should receive at least 90% vote to be approved. It will go through the same process we have nominated mods through, I’m just proposing a high vote threshold. Once this is decided on, we can create a nomination thread for SensiblePerson.
Please discuss here. If you start shit in here, I’m going to move the posts to french bbv. You’ve been warned.
I think it’s great Sensible Person volunteered, I don’t remember if we voted on a length of time the proposal thread has to stay open, but if we have, it’s fine, waiting a bit is no great trial, everybody just please log the fuck off and enjoy the weekend.
I am not going to pass off a new admin on an inline poll in a thread probably half this forum has on mute, that was the way it was done last time and I really wasn’t okay with how that went down. We have an established process for doing stuff, just use it, or like, I don’t know, it’s gonna be a huge issue in the future when you need to choose a new admin. It’s a really powerful position, and if ANYTHING on this site needs some kind of process, it’s this.
Know if I get elected admin that I will completely disregard the will of the forum members and act in ways that I consider appropriate. Your complaints and feedback will fall on deaf ears and my enforcement of the unspoken rules will be highly inconsistent and arbitrary. I hold grudges and will ban people who are annoying.
If you want an administrator like that, please vote for me
It’s true that when the proposal for a judicial panel, with you as the head and “admin for life,” was being discussed (however seriously), I did threaten to leave the site.
I did that because I felt that I could not trust you with the high level of access to user data, along with the power over the site, that being an admin would entail.
I felt that I could not trust you due to your treatment of zikzak (and others, but especially him) over an extended period of time, before and after the move from Exiled, where you repeatedly accused him of being like Stalin, of having some self-serving motivation for the work he was doing, and even of conspiring to use the forum to make money for himself.
I felt this was uncalled-for, disrespectful, and hurtful. I never saw any apology or acknowledgement of that from you, and my feeling is that someone capable of that kind of attack should not be trusted with a role as important as admin.
You may say now you were joking around or kidding, but it sure didn’t come across that way to me, and I’m pretty sure not to zikzak or the other volunteers trying to build something for the community. I’m all about humor and having fun with stuff, but in my opinion this went way out of bounds.
All that said, other than that, I’m fine with you as a poster. In particular I appreciated you lending your expertise in the early COVID threads. It would be a shame for you to leave if I end up being admin, and I’d encourage you to stay.
I also have an extensive library of computer-related LOLcats. Here’s an example:
Seriously though, my job is building and maintaining websites, including server administration, installing and configuring necessary software “stacks,” setting up content management systems, etc. I’ve been doing it for a long time, on a number of different systems, and the sites I’m responsible for only very rarely shit the bed (very rarely).
I can get into more details if people are interested.
Are the configurations and customizations for the site checked into a github account with multiple admins? I saw in another thread that someone recommended nuking the site and putting the domain name up for sale. Probably a joke, but an easy insurance policy against an abuse of power is to have a github account that the admin does not have full control over.
The Twitter account was also mentioned – that could also be owned by someone other than the admin (I think? jmakin mentioned a problem with it).
This doesn’t make sense to me at all. If the admin doesn’t have admin over stuff he needs to like, maintain or restore the site, what is he actually doing?
For the github account, it would be a place to store the admin’s work, an optionally public record of that work, and a straightforward way to recover the site in case of a disaster. It effectively limits the power of the admin to nuke the whole community using technical means. The admin would of course have read/write access to the github repo, just not the ability to nuke the whole thing.
I think of it as a break glass mechanism – the people who are owners of the github account don’t really need to do anything, except if the admin nukes the site and disappears.
If you and/or the new admin want to set it up, I’d be happy to do the research and document the process.
The server does (or at least did) a full backup to a remote host once a week. The backup script comes from the Discourse developers themselves and is designed so that a full restoration can be easily done.
That’s really all that matters. There’s nothing else to put in a git repository. We aren’t that customized, and what little we have is in the backup. The only truly important information is what’s in the database. Everything else is very close to a stock Discourse installation.
Access to the backup needs to obviously be limited to either an existing admin or somebody who can be trusted with the role. afaik jmakin and ggoreo are the only two people who can download it currently.
we’re all safe at home on our computers nobody’s actually stalin bro come on. we started out wanting a democratic government, and that didn’t get much interest while gaming it out, so we thought about nominating representatives and nobody cared enough about grabbing power to even nominate themselves, we’re a very modest group. so zikzak says hey let me run it like a dictatorship it’ll be better. and he did and it was, just like stalin i mean it’s a pretty good analogy idk why you’re busting my balls about it now.
Definitely not intentionally throwing shade. Just couching my language because I can only authoritatively speak of how things were 6 months ago and you could have put a different backup system in place since then.
