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: 3, Insightful) by dalek on Saturday May 27 2023, @05:31AM (1 child)
I was one of the people who criticized you for, as you say, holding a gun to SN's head, and the impact on recruiting volunteers. I posted that as an AC, but you can probably see who posted AC comments, so I'll own my comment. I try to call it like I see it. I appreciate you listening and writing this story in good faith. As a community member, that means a lot. My offer to help edit 2-3 stories each week stands. Why wouldn't I do more? Just as you've said you have your own obligations and in real life, I have mine as well. It's what I think I can do given my other obligations and my need to pay my own bills.
For what it's worth, I appreciate your concerns about being liable for data breaches. As I posted in another comment from this account, those are valid concerns, and I don't blame you one bit for being worried about that. I don't have experience in Perl, nor do I have any experience running a website of this scale, so I'm not qualified to help you there. If I were the right person to address the technical debt, I'd do so, but I don't have that expertise. As I said in my AC comment and in an email to one of the staff, I'll help as I feel I'm able, which means editing a few stories.
Thank you, NCommander.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Saturday May 27 2023, @07:15AM
Your offer to edit an occasional story is gladly accepted! There is also another task that I think is right up your street, as they say. We can discuss it privately.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.