[clue-admin] Clue mailing list

[erik at ezolan.com]

> Over time phpBB has had more problems than Mailman - and they've been
> more serious to boot.  But right now phpBB is more secure - now that's
> something I never thought I'd say.  I don't think any of these have
> exploits in the wild, but it's surprising.
>
> And while others have pointed out that CLUE needs more admins - it's
> probably also worth mentioning that Erik is welcome to help in that
> process, right?  I can't say cause I'm not an admin - I just lurk
> here.

I've run a phpBB for about 2 years now. I've had to upgrade it twice due
to exploits, the first time being proactive and the second being reactive.

90% of the work I've done on the site was me trying to be all fancy and
add mods and skins and such. Some mods required you to manually edit your
skin, and when you've added 12 skins...

Lesson learned.

I've been waiting for the next version to come out. After all the
experience they've had, they sat down and redesigned the whole thing.
They're currently in the "Feature Freeze, bug squishing" phase and should
announce a Beta in the next month or two. So, my point is that even if we
want to start using a forum, I'd like to wait until the next phpBB comes
out of beta. Admin it? Sure, no problem. It's easy.

Plus, CLUE wouldn't exist without volunteers.

>Also, sorry to be abrupt about it, but don't hold your breath. The folks
>who admin the system have plenty of to-do's in line ahead of doing
>something such as installing and configuring a web-based forum system. I
>would take a very significant increase in real benefit for us to want to
>take on something such as that.

Don't worry about being abrupt, people who have to get things done tend to
be that. :-)

Most of the reasons center on this: The admins of the box don't want to
bother with setting up and maintaining a forum. Well, there's no reason to
look at forum software unless someone is willing to take responsibility
for it. Once the next version of PhpBB is ready, I'd be happy to do so.

Of course, all this is moot if the users don't want it. And there's no
point in bringing up the option until it's ready to be implemented. I
brought it up because I was wondering why we weren't using forum software.

----

And now for the other stuff:

>> And finally, I believe a forum is better at building communities.

>Why do you believe this?  I don't use forums so they are ineffective at
>building community for me (I'm sure some of that is generational).

Because otherwise all online communities would have just stuck to email
lists. :-) Do you read Blogs much? It's easy to simply set up a BCC and
email every subscriber your latest post. Not only is it easy, it's *free*.
Yet everyone uses a web based, very visual blogs. Only people trying to
sell you something use BCC: lists these days.

>I guess it would be a great service if CLUE indexed the Internet.  For
>those that have soured on Google.

Eh, not if I had to use my mail client to search through it. :-)

>So that's one more piece of software to configure and maintain.

But what they didn't say is "Hey, if people want it, and you're willing to
commit to installing it, updating it and maintaining it, sure.

>No worries about the server slowing down under load.

Although I've never worried about that, what are the specs of the server
CLUE runs off of? What kind of setup are we using?

>Yeah, I don't get web email either.  But I'm the resident Luddite.

See, this is something I understand. When you do all your email at the
command line, cranking up your web browser is annoying and an extra step.

But if you're already using web-based email, then going to another site
isn't an unusual action.

>Or if it doesn't violate company policy you could read the mail on your
>machine at home from work.  The network is the computer, though many
>seem to be unaware.

Sorry to hear about your strict company policy. I hope it's because you do
secure work for the government, and not some twisted Dilbertesque reason.

I SSH to my Linux box, but all my email is web based now so I use "Links"
when I'm restricted to a terminal window.

Huh. Going over the admin-archive it looks like I screwed up. I thought
that replacing the subject with something new in my reply would start a
new thread, not have it attached to the original thread.

Erik Z