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Re: forums.debian.net - who's in charge?

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Hi good people

I'm a junior member of the admin team at forums.debian.net. I'll just 
copy/paste my reply to the thread Mez has started in the admin chat 
section of the forums:

 >>>"I read that mailing list thread but don't get the point. The only 
concerns about "safety" I know of concern the fact the forums are http, 
not https.
I've been a member of the forums since 2006 and Spam Hunter for a year 
or so. IMO the forums have improved over that time and the current admin 
team do an admirable job.
Banning of members is almost exclusively for spammers, with only 1 or 2 
others this year for bad behaviour and then only temporarily.
An FAQ section has been introduced which has helped to reduce the 
incidence of "go RTFM" to virtually nil. Try that on the Arch forums 
which are much more elitist than FDN. The participation of DDs to answer 
some of the more difficult technical questions would be welcomed 
although there are some quite knowledgeable regulars and very few 
questions go unanswered.
The main concern for admins is the lack of maintenance on the servers 
where there have been reports that CAPTCHA doesn't work properly and the 
listed admin contact emails are not contactable. Thanks Mez for what you 
do but the servers' software seems to need more regular attention.

The forums contain an encyclopaedia of Debian knowledge and answers to 
both common and rare issues, and is obviously way more popular as a 
reference than a simple post count would suggest as there are usually 
hundreds of people reading at any time - currently "In total there are 
200 users online :: 1 registered, 2 hidden and 197 guests (based on 
users active over the past 5 minutes)". To close the forums would be a 
travesty and leave a major vacuum in online knowledge and assistance for 
Debian users.

To alleviate those occasional complaints about safety, enable https.

And I would suspect the complaints alluded to on the mailing list may 
have come from someone like bkpsusmitaa who has been a serial menace and 
was just banned for a week for abusing the post report system. You can 
check if the IP they come from was from Barrackpore and Mysore, most 
recently 117.208.152.101 .
The supposed complaints are likely an attempt to disrupt by someone with 
an axe to grind. I'm very interested to read exactly what those 
complaints are. The admin team have not received any recently to my 
knowledge."

Respectfully

Roger E.

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Re: forums.debian.net - who's in charge? Roger E <sonicrat@riseup.net> - 2021-03-31 09:20 +0200

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