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posted by NCommander on Saturday May 27 2023, @04:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the perdition's-edge dept.

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

 
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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by acid andy on Saturday May 27 2023, @10:51AM (4 children)

    by acid andy (1683) on Saturday May 27 2023, @10:51AM (#1308462) Homepage Journal

    Are you suggesting that Copilot could wind up using Rehash to Take the Pain Out of Building Websites [soylentnews.org]?

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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 28 2023, @02:03PM (3 children)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday May 28 2023, @02:03PM (#1308656) Journal

    Well, they don't promise to take the pain out of maintaining those web sites, do they? :-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday May 28 2023, @02:49PM (2 children)

      by acid andy (1683) on Sunday May 28 2023, @02:49PM (#1308660) Homepage Journal

      True but these days obliterating everything and starting from scratch seems to be more trendy.

      --
      Welcome to Edgeways. Words should apply in advance as spaces are highly limite—
      • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Sunday May 28 2023, @03:11PM

        by acid andy (1683) on Sunday May 28 2023, @03:11PM (#1308666) Homepage Journal

        I just got *whooshed*. Need to go back to sleep.

        --
        Welcome to Edgeways. Words should apply in advance as spaces are highly limite—
      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by janrinok on Sunday May 28 2023, @06:20PM

        by janrinok (52) Subscriber Badge on Sunday May 28 2023, @06:20PM (#1308687) Journal

        Whether you were 'wooshed' or not doesn't matter - you make a valid point.

        Currently all options are still being considered but, no matter what happens, if we stay here then we have to rid ourselves of the effectively unmaintainable Perl code. That doesn't mean throwing it away on day 1. But currently it a a monolithic blob - it might be possible to break it down into functional parts and start by recoding the various parts into different, more appropriate languages that will be maintainable into the future. The Perl code appears to be kept in logical functional modules. I'm not saying that is what we will do - but it is a possibility. There is no reason why the creation of new accounts or the management of existing ones needs to be in Perl. It does not require an instantaneous response, the displays don't need real-time updating, a second or two will make no difference. The management of submissions and their processing to the story queue could be done with lots of existing packages (no - please - no VIM/Emacs war now) They could be written in almost any language and probably still work. But the result would be something that could be more easily maintained and, more importantly, modified as needs and requirements demand. It wouldn't need the entire Perl package to be recompiled each time a minor change was introduced. We would still have to follow the best software management and control techniques, the testing, and then system integration, but it would be easier to accomplish.

        The problem with sticking it into a container is that once we have done so I suspect that it will require significantly more effort to maintain than adding a few lines of Python, or Rust, or whatever. The Perl build might be automated, but who will be doing the merges of patches accepted from the community? If we have a Perl programmer then our single point of failure becomes that programmer. That is what finally happened when TMB left; he had become our single point of failure. But this is not my area of expertise and I will defer to those who are more current than I am. I used to have to work with multiple systems, all written in different languages by different manufacturers, but which all had to operate as a single airborne entity. The interfaces were critical, but it made the system far more flexible in the longer term.

        I thought that lots of smaller programs that each do one thing but do it well was the Unix/Linux way? A stand-alone CMS, a web interface, a moderation module, etc etc.

        --
        I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.