Re: News Flash: Resignation of Executive Board members, delink of zucchini.fl.us.blitzed.org

On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 10:34:20AM -0400, Andrew wrote:
> I am very curious about this. Zucchini voted on the ircd vote, which does
> mean they are around participating right?

In order to get their participation, I had to send voting reminders
daily, and finally contact her on IRC.  Of course I have no way to
tell that she would not have voted without the reminders, but I
would not consider that a sign of an active admin.

It is not acceptable that:
- she didn't update her configs in time
- she didn't explain why it hasn't been done
- when finally she got delinked she gave some very poor excuses
  about misunderstanding how it should be done, which I don't
  accept since she made no effort during the evaluation of it, or
  the implementation of it, to ask anyone if she was correct in her
  assumption that it didn't apply to her.  This is the admin of a
  hub server we are talking about here.

> would that not mean she is indeed not AWOL.

Disagree.  In order to get zucchini to function to the minimum level
required of a server on Blitzed we basically would have to be
spending more effort than doing her tasks for her would take with
ssh access.

I am not sure how much easier it could be than copying and pasting a
set of lines from a web page into an ircd.conf and then setting the
passwords.

> You gave two out of the three servers, who (for whatever
> reason) did not update their configs, the benefit of the doubt. Why did
> you not extend this rationale to zucchini?

Because it was managed so much worse than any other IRC server here.
zucchini was a lost cause, with a complete lack of response from its
admin.

chocolate was missing every single config change apart from the one
that I personally msged Mark about, which got half done.  He
explained to me why it was only half done, and he said he was going
to work out what he would do with the server in general, which may
yet include a delink.

John replied and said that he was "away or detached" as his only
explanation.  Do you regard that as an acceptable explanation for
failing to configure an irc server given more than a week to do it?
I don't and that's why there was some punishment, which I didn't
feel the need to go into in public but it did happen so although it
was spared delink it's not like its problems are being ignored.

It was only from zucchini that there was no response.

> Instead, I am pretty sure that they won't be returning now, and
> now we are down to one server in the united states.

If I thought the server belong on Blitzed I would not have delinked
it.  I do not want it back.  If the admin had responded to the
thread days ago and said what she was doing to make sure this never
happened again, or if she had offered to pass its management to
other people, or given any realistic plan for bringing it into
sanity then it might have been different.  But we got nothing.
Should that behaviour have been encouraged?

> I also do not see how the comment that 'almost none' of the admins care
> around here.

I did not make that comment, at least not in the sense you are
trying to make of it.  It's a fact that out of 13 servers that
required changes, only 3 of them were able to make those changes
under their own power, and I have explained just how easy those
changes were, and you were one of the 3 that were able to make them.

If you don't like me saying that "the admin team has failed to care"
or whatever then just focus on the facts.  If I truly thought that
the whole admin team had permanently lost interest then I would just
ask for ssh access and delink any of you that didn't want to give
it, soldier on with a couple of client servers until the probable
shrinking to utter irrelevance.

> Obviously there have been admins that care, I think all care..
> just some do not have as much time as others.

Do you believe it is preferred that any of us should have to email
and explain to the admins of 13 different IRC servers about what
lines to put in their config files as opposed to just putting up a
page and relying on them to type it in themselves given a week?

What you appear to be advocating is that some admins can give so
little time that they expect others to edit their config files via
email and irc?

> Im not sure how emergency this was to delink servers and such
> without an admin vote.

The behaviour of the admin team in regards to this config change
shows what level of commitment they feel is acceptable, and I
disagree.

You may feel that I am wrong and it is OK for someone to have to go
around poking admins until they can be bothered to copy and paste
but I would urge you to try doing that yourself first on some other
13-server network where you don't have ssh access to most of the
servers concerned.

> I am pretty sure that the ircd vote was indeed carried out in a
> swift manner..so surely there were better options then this.

I asked for some suggestions on how to prevent this happening again
and none were given.  I received no response whatsoever from
zucchini's admin.

> That is usually what happens when you keep all of the decisions to
> one though. One persons judgement is often one sided.

Which is an excellent motivation for the admins getting off their
arses and asking themselves if they really want more unilateral
decisions.

Like I say it isn't shameful to admit that one doesn't actually have
time to be an IRC admin anymore, and this routing plan thing is a
clear indicator that many admins here do not have time/interest.
Whether that is a temporary lapse for them, or a more permanent
thing reflecting their changing priorities is something they need to
work out for themselves and act accordingly.

It would be better all-around for anyone who feels they don't have
the time to make changes such as the previous routing plan to leave
now (hopefully giving us time to work around their departure).

> thats all I really have to say about all of this drama.

Just be aware that while you charecterise it as drama as if to
dismiss it, you do actually participate in it.

I hope that you will not be part of a very long thread debating what
I could or should have done in response to this (after the fact)
despite the general silence when I DID ask what should be done, only
to finish the thread off with some comment about how it is all drama
that doesn't matter.

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