Full disclosure about being able to read the pm’s. I didn’t know about this feature til a month or maybe 2 months ago. I was just clicking around in admin account and accidentally saw some stuff I really didn’t want to see. I am shocked that that is a legit feature, but be assured that no one is reading your pm’s. The logs can be pulled by mods I believe, if they care to, and this can be shown. The logs cannot be deleted so there’s no way someone can read a bunch of stuff and then delete the evidence.
It is a capability I really, really wish was not there, which is why I encourage everyone to use encrypted pm’s. It’s a pain in the ass to set up - but, it really is the way around this issue.
This seems like what the role should ideally be. I understand that isn’t really possible in practice long term though.
Thanks for keeping the lights on for us and for everything you’ve put up with to this point. I’m sorry UP has caused you undue stress, but know that you are appreciated.
@SensiblePerson Would you consider taking over admin/tech support? I don’t think we should even call it Admin because everyone seems to agree that all the parts of the job jmakin and zikzac hated shouldn’t be part of the job. We need someone to watch the servers and update the software once in a while. I think you’d be great.
Since you asked nicely, twice, I’ll reluctantly – very reluctantly – agree to do it.
I’ll say that part of my reluctance is due to “me” things (I have a lot going on in my life already), but a big part of the reluctance is exactly the kinds of things jmakin is talking about. And I should further say that I have pretty much exactly the same take on it that he and zikzak do.
Countering my reluctance is at least a couple things: I think it’s unfair to jmakin to leverage his conscientiousness to basically force him to continue the job when he doesn’t want to keep doing it. Also, I would like to feel like I’m contributing to the community to give back, since I have gotten a lot of value out of it since the 2p2 exodus (along with a lot of angst too).
All that said, I think I could do what’s necessary to keep the forum up and running without getting pulled into drama or abusing admin powers.
So what I’d propose is:
With the community’s approval, commit to handling admin duties for the site for 6 months (Jul - Dec 2021). At the end of that time, we’d assess how it’s going, and either select a new admin, or I’d stay on.
What I would not commit to: being on call, fulfilling random site customization or configuration requests, or guaranteeing 24/7/365 site uptime. If that’s a requirement for the job, someone else will need to do it.
For reference, the last time we did an admin handoff, there was quite a bit of discussion in this thread (skim past the first few posts):
If anyone has questions about the admin role and responsibilities, technical aspects of the forum software, and/or the handoff process, they may be answered in that thread.
If not, all should feel free to raise questions here and we can discuss further. Hope that helps. Let me know what you (collectively) think.
Thank you so much @SensiblePerson it means a lot. Give me a week or two to take stock of what I need to do to hand off, and in the meantime we can make a community vote, I’ll give my full endorsement
As far as 24/7/365 uptime goes, the job is pretty easy. Log in once in a while to check cpu/memory usage. You can literally shut down the vm on and off and the site will always come back. It’s pretty sturdy and zikzak did a great job setting it up so it’s pretty hands free.
I’m not doing software updates because one update introduced breaking changes to ggoreo’s frontend code.
If you want I could probably be convinced to set up alerts so you don’t even need to log in to check on anything.
If we do end up going through this handoff, I think it would be very useful to create a formal “handoff” document so that others could step in should @SensiblePerson or whoever else need to step aside.
Like, as the one paying for the account, I assume that I should be able to contact Digital Ocean and get access in case of emergency? (Maybe this is untrue) But I wouldn’t know what the hell to do. Having that document would be helpful in keeping things up and running.
I believe you have access, yes. But you don’t have vm access as far as I’m aware. As far as a handoff document zikzak already documented the steps. Mine will be even simpler because I registered the email service with the admin@unstuckpolitics.com email address, which forwards to whoever is admin, so we could just leave that as-is, and change the cc info (it’s only pennies a month, literally). Setting that up was the only thing that required any real work.
Then I just add the new admin to the unstuck project in DO, create new sudo user in the VM, give access to our google DNS, bingo bango bongo done, unless I’m not thinking of something - there’s also the twitter api keys and stuff, but you could just leave those there (they’re my personal account right now - I tried to create an admin@unstuckpolitics.com twitter but that account is stuck in limbo for 6 months now) or create new api keys.
I recall this being a rub that while the forum software suggests taking every beta update this caused issues with the site customizations. I’d suggest a more clear coordination on updates as to minimize potential issues caused updates playing poorly with the site customization.
I also think this is a good idea. It sounds like zikzak and jmakin have some docs already, but since I’ll be needing to get up to speed on our setup I’ll certainly be taking some notes and stuff, so one of my goals will be to beef up documentation while I’m at it.
Yea let’s definitely NOT do that again. I think we should make a poll/thread in about unstuck, and pin it at the top of the site. I can do that today.
I expect it’ll be mostly unanimous because you’ve been here a while, are in good standing with the whole community, and most importantly, are willing to do it for a little while.
It’s entirely possible that by the time you’re done with it I’ll be ready to do it for a little while again, but I don’t know (or even if the community would trust me again). That’s a problem for another day. Rotating admins is not a bad idea at all. But we bought 6 months, so thank you again.
Real life is more important and people need breaks from time to time. There’s no reason being willing to admit that about yourself should erode anyone’s trust in you.
I was supposed to do this but never got around to it. I also found that what existed was plenty for me to get off the ground. ZZ did a really really good job.
I’ll definitely document the mailgun setup if I can remember wtf I did. We had issues with mail getting flagged as spam, so I had to modify our domain records a bit to fix that. You shouldn’t need to even touch it though except to recover the account to change the password, and then change the cc info (i dont wanna leave mine on there).
Honestly, you’ll almost certainly have to do absolutely nothing in 6 months except upgrade the droplet’s size or update the OS - the former doubles our bill. I really wanted to do this for peace of mind, but, I know that eats into our budget and should probably be a community discussion, but I’ll leave that decision to you.
I guess we never ratified a rule for new admins, but we could probably just retitle this thread with an RFC prefix, see if anyone has anything to add, and then move for a binding community vote thread.