Re: [svlug-announce] (forw) Re: [volunteers] Resubscribing to the SVLUG List

Quoting Ivan Sergio Borgonovo ([email protected]):

> I saw very few traffic on the list recently, you've lost a stable venue 
> for the meetings/speech and I'm not local.

I have just removed all subscribers from mailing list svlug-announce,
and then re-added them from an immediately-before-saved copy of the
roster (that I carefully checked manually for invalid or problematic
text contents).

I am considering doing a similar thing for this mailing list, though 
it's not obvious to preserve some of the subscribers' existing options
such as nomail or plain/HTML.  Digest versus regular is no problem to
preserve, as this can be captured by Mailman's bin/list_members utility
into separate roster files and then created in custom bin/add_users 
operations with the relevant options on the command line.

> I'm not a sysadmin and delegating stuff requires trust, still I've spent 
> more than half my life being paid for programming, so if I can share 
> some of the load, let me know.

Yes.  A thousand times, yes.

The invitation has been open for years and years and years.
Coordination is supposed to be done via the [email protected]
mailing list .  Administrative shell access is freely available to all
reasonably serious SVLUG members.  All details of what we do have been
covered over and over for documentation purposes in response to
questions (answered for the last ten years pretty much exclusively by
me) on [email protected]  Therefore, the answers to pretty
much all relevant questions are present, over and over, in the archives
for that mailing list.  My experience was that I'd be asked a bunch of
questions, I would patiently answer them in full, and then I would get
asked them again a few days later, most often by the same person,
whereupon I would patiently answer them in full again.

Lather, rinse, repeat.  Ten years, in round figures.  

I'm pretty much done.  You want to share some of the load, thanks!  I
appreciate it.  I can create shell for you on lists.svlug.org and on
www.svlug.org, and ensure that you have root.  There is host-level
documentation in places that are made extremely obvious via symlink
'site-docs' in your homedir, and (e.g.) there is a 'web' symlink in
homedirs on www.svlug.org that points to the Lighttpd document root.
So, every effort has been made to make both virthosts self-documenting,
and www.svlug.org has within its site-docs directory other essential
information such as domain information.

Glad to give you, or just about anyone making a serious offer to run /
seriously assist in running SVLUG's operations the shell access
required.  Just contact me offlist.

What I'm not going to do is keep being the sole person everyone punts
to, nor am I going to keep explaining everything over and over.  Far too
many people's idea of 'helping' has been to merely barrage me with
questions and then never actually doing anything else, or in some cases 
doing things that then requires tens of man-hours to revert or (worse)
roll forward a new implementation to fix something grauitously broken.

The worst of those _always_ involved either a uselessly vague entry by
the volunteer in question in site-docs/ChangeLog or no entry at all.

If you read through site-docs/ChangeLog, you will find numerous cases
where I've had to fix someone's work and/or fix the person's
site-docs/ChangeLog description, imploring that person to in the future
please provide at least enough detail so that his/her work can be
accurately reverted if necessary.  This is pretty much the exact sort
of hell that Operations was invented to prevent, but some people are
really slow learners, and you will observe in site-docs/ChangeLog the
same persons persist in writing vague site-docs/ChangeLog descriptions
even after this has already happened and been called out numerous times.