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I'm going to simply write this quickly now. I have had very long discussions with a member of the community known as kolie who has been negotiating to try and keep SN operational, and help provide a realistic plan for both rebuilding the site, and migration. I was approached after the shutdown post was put up via public contact information. He has offered help in the form of hosting, capital, and helping coding a replacement for rehash. He has convinced me that there are enough people in the community that it might be possible to pay down the technical debt.
I was asked to formally take the gun off SN's head, since it doesn't help recruit volunteers if there's a death sentence.
I am more than a little reluctance to do this, simply on the basis that there has been a long history on this site of saying "we'll do X", and then X never happens. The situation was also discussed prior with Matt, and quite a few other people before I finally made the decision after it became clear to me that the situation had become completely untenable. I spent weeks looking for an alternative before I finally resided myself that there were no other viable options. But sometimes you can be wrong, and sometimes you can get outside help.
One of my cited reasons for shutting down SN was that calls for help were left unanswered. However, said call finally got answered and came at the 11th hour, and as an unsolicited DM by someone who wanted to see the site go on. We have been discussing this at length since Monday, in a conversation that at this point has been longer than everything said in a private, staff channel for the last six months. So, I accept the possibility I can be wrong. More specifically, I hope I am wrong.
So, ultimately, I will put my faith in someone I have never met before. It might be absurd sounding, but that is ultimately how SN started. A bunch of people who never met coming together to make a replacement for Slashdot. I will take steps to keep SN going past the 30th. This may involve the legal entity changing, as the PBC already voted to dissolve itself. I will write more on this next week, since frankly, I need time to sit back and reflect. I also need to write some emails.
The staff have told me that they will not work with me going forward. For my part, the feeling is mutual.
There are also the facts that I listed in the shutdown letter. SN's codebase is effectively unmaintained since the departure of TMB. I've already discussed the state of infrastructure to death, but there's an objective truth here: SN's VMs were exposed to the open Internet on end-of-life operating systems for years and the database cluster had been in an extended failure with corrupted log tables. As I see it, the staff allowed SN to degrade to the point that it was about to entirely fail. As I understand it, they see me as acting rashly and irresponsibly in attempting to address the situation. I freely admitted I could have done better.
At the end of the day, the only worse outcome than a volunteer shutdown is one where the site is either compromised, or lost in a crash. SN was one hard shutdown from an unrecoverable cluster failure.
That is not a viable state of affairs. That is a liability nightmare that at the end of the day the PBC is responsible for, which was the basis on which I intervened.
Finally, I'm only still here because SN has never been able to accommodate people leaving, especially as no one has historically been willing to take over legal responsibility for the operation of the site. I resigned three years ago. SN needs actual governance by people who can ultimately say that Z, Y, and X need to be done, and have the ability to either have it done, or can help raise the money to help get it done.
So, I guess we'll see if miracles happen twice.
~ NCommander
(Score: 4, Interesting) by separatrix on Monday May 29, @06:19PM (2 children)
To NCommander, and everybody -- Hi, I'm new.
I just joined up, here at the last minute, to assert my presence, and to say, yes, I'd like to help. I do so primarily because you posted this show of faith. Had you not posted the original announcement of a shutdown, the arrival of people like kolie, and these conversations about saving SN, would simply not be happening.
I don't know anyone involved with this site. I see from posts like this about the shutdown, and their comment threads, that there's been no small amount of internecine fighting over the management and governance of SN. I take no side here, except to say that I'd like to see the site survive and thrive. Even though one of the bitter arguments seems to be about whether the site should be devoted to "politics" vs "tech", the site itself, and the tech that makes it possible, is close to being undone by its internal politics.
To that end, I'm volunteering to help with the "actual governance by people who can ultimately say that Z, Y, and X need to be done, and have the ability to either have it done, or can help raise the money to help get it done." I have virtually no ability to code. But as I said in my first-ever comments yesterday, I have extensive experience with the technical skills of politics: running meetings, parliamentary procedure, reading legal code. I've served on the boards of not-for-profits, raised money, have founded for-profits. If and when you're ready for a volunteer to help you untangle your governance issues, I'm available.
I've read SN on rare occasions over the years, primarily because it was trying to pick up where Slashdot left off with development of its codebase. I believe that Slash/Rehash is the best approach to having civil, moderated conversations online. I've always believed this. I hope I can be of help to the organization doing the most to further its development.
(Score: 1) by kneutron on Tuesday May 30, @03:58PM (1 child)
--Yah, I signed up with a new account today as well, because of the post that someone intends to help save the site. Used to read SN years ago, but then I went thru a divorce and kind of forgot about it. No idea what my former userid was, if I had one. But there were good articles worth forwarding.
--My cautious take is to suggest NCommander turn over 100% to the new maintainers within 60 days and then walk away from it entirely, for sanity's sake. Then it's Someone Else's Problem and he can take a bit of vacation and de-stress. Just make sure that there's a good backup of existing infrastructure when the handover happens.
--Just my $2.02, with inflation ;-)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Tuesday May 30, @06:12PM
I'll reply in this comment but I would like to say to Late, RunningWithWind, separatrix, H_Fisher, richi and kneutron - welcome to the site. The last few days I have seen more genuine new accounts created than in the rest of the month put together. And there are possibly others but I haven't seen any activity from them yet. They are possibly still lurking and looking around. So welcome to them also if they see this comment - you are included too.