[Mageia-sysadm] Migration of the forums

[Wolfgang Bornath]

2012/9/19 nicolas vigier <boklm at mars-attacks.org>:
> Hello,
>
> After yesterday meeting in #mageia-forums, and discussions on forums
> mailing list, it seems forums team do not like the way the forums are
> currently setup, and there seems to be no cooperation possible between
> sysadmin and forums admins, with most of the time spent with endless
> fights to tell who is responsible for the problem rather than trying to
> fix the problem.
>
> I am tired of spending time on this kind of thing, so in order to stop
> this, unless someone else from sysadmin team wants to work on forums,
> I suggest sysadmin team do not manage forums setup anymore.
>
> In order to do this :
>  - we remove ldap authentication from the forums. Users will have to
>    use a separate account and password for the forums. That's already
>    what they have to do if they want to use forums in other languages
>    than english and german. And after looking at database dumps from phpbb,
>    it seems it contains hash of user passwords although we are using ldap
>    for authentication, so using ldap authentication with phpbb is maybe
>    not a good idea for security anyway.
>  - they use their own server, or we provide them a VM on sucuk while
>    they don't have one
>  - they install the forums however they want, and manage them however
>    they want
>  - they use a separate domain name like mageia-forums.org or something
>    else. We can add a redirect from http://forums.mageia.org/{en,de}/ to
>    the new URL until all references to the old URLs are removed. On
>    http://forums.mageia.org/ homepage we put a listing of all Mageia
>    community forums
>  - we provide them a dump of the current forums, after cleaning user
>    passwords, and they do the install and import of the database on
>    a new forum themself
>  - we are not responsible for anything on the new forums
>
> What do you think about this ?

"Do not like the setup" seems to be the wrong expression, although the
past may have caused this impression. But what is the background of
this situation? IMHO it is not the system as it is, it is rather the
lack of organisation.

Past turbulences were mainly caused by
 - a technical forum admin who was not available in the way he should
have been and had not enough skills to do the work
 - a bad communication between this technical forum admin and the
sysadmin group
 - lack of a dedicated sysadmin to respond to the needs of the forum admin.

If we have
 - a technical forum admin (with or without helpers) who prepares code
changes and talks to a dedicated sysadmin
 - a dedicated sysadmin who implements the prepared changes within a
reasonable time span
everything is ok.

BTW: I've been wasting a lot of time with this issue a year ago and
like you I am tired of writing the same sentences all over again.
Still IMHO there's no need to throw out the baby with the bath water

-- 
wobo