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Audioguy was one of the original team who created the existing SoylentNews site. He has stayed with us since that time and has served the community as a sys-admin for over 10 years. It is no exaggeration to say that over the last year or two he has played an almost single-handed role in keeping this site working.
Audioguy has suffered a series of significant personal and medical events over the last 6 months or so. He is now about to commence ophthalmic surgery tomorrow (Wednesday) and is facing other potentially life changing medical issues in the near future. He has, quite understandably and reluctantly, been forced to stand down from his role which was effective from late last week. Unfortunately that has meant that we have lost the ability to correct the current certificates problem. Access to the Linode servers is still controlled by the existing Board and we have experienced additional problems accessing one of our servers by the usual methods. This appears to be common to many staff and has further exacerbated the current problem.
I have written an email to NCommander requesting his assistance in updating the certificates so that the site becomes fully operational again. Your patience is appreciated. What might appear to many in the community to be a relatively minor issue is, behind the scenes, a major blow to the existing team. We have other sys-admins who are ready to pick up the challenge but they do not yet have the necessary access, nor are they yet experienced in managing the beast that that is Slashd.
Returning to audioguy, I am sure that the entire community would wish to join me in thanking him for a decade of support to the site, and to wish him well for the upcoming surgery. He remains one of this community and evidence of his past contributions can be found in numerous bits of code and associated documentation. He has also, for example, been the manager of the technical wiki which has been vital to the support team for all of that period. We are indebted to him.
Good luck for the future, audioguy. Take it easy. Best wishes to you and your family.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Tuesday May 07 2024, @04:48PM (3 children)
I am unclear which 'control structure' you are criticising. Do you mean the existing Board which comprises of NCommander, Matt Angel and kolie, or are you referring to myself and a few others who are trying to get this resolved?
We have a new Board for the new Company which is made up of community volunteers. There are also Community Representatives who are from the community. One of their initial tasks will be to organise elections to confirm their positions or to be replaced by others selected by the community. The Bylaws - which you have had numerous chances to study - give control back to the community. All the site assets will belong to the community. That is what we have been working towards this last year or so. I would much prefer to be carrying on with my Editor role.
None of the names that you see trying to resolve this situation will be on the Board.
We had just reached the point of requesting that the transfer of the site from the current Board to the new Board to begin when we had the bombshell from audioguy. He was the only sys-admin on the team who has experience of the existing codebase and knows how the build of a complete system should be carried out. Furthermore, we could no longer fix the SSL certificate ourselves because of lack of access permissions to the Linode management page. Furthermore, for unknown reasons, none of the existing staff could access the relevant servers to commence the work either.
I asked NCommander for help, he gave it willingly, and the SSL certificate problem was resolved.
But how will we build the new site if we haven't got an experienced sys-admin? So I am feverishly looking at alternative solutions to our problem. Your criticism has been invaluable in resolving this issue.
Now, what are you volunteering to do to help?
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 07 2024, @11:21PM
Parent is already at +5, otherwise I would have added a Touche' for this zinger:
> Now, what are you volunteering to do to help?
Sorry, this AC has zero programming and sysadmin experience, so I'm no help for that kind of role.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Wednesday May 08 2024, @10:42AM (1 child)
audioguy deserves not just thanks for doing the sysadmin job, but also for doing it with all the organizational issues that have been going on in the background.
(Score: 3, Informative) by janrinok on Wednesday May 08 2024, @11:18AM
audioguy also played a major role in writing the first 5 versions of the bylaws which took a significant amount of time, and he attended many of the weekly Governance meetings.
[nostyle RIP 06 May 2025]