Retiring of blogs.fedoraproject.org

[Jayson Rowe]

On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 10:52 PM, Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 11:57, inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Outsourcing services can be attractive in ways, but there is often a
>> cost paid by the user in the end. It seems to normally be a win from
>> the perspective of the outsourcer but not such a win from the
>> perspective of those who get passed off to be someone else's problem.
>>
>> Sorry to vent a little about this here but I really think blogs.fp.o
>> has more value than it is being given credit for and I'm sad to see it
>> being retired. (And I accept that even if it was given the credit I
>> think it deserves the decision to retire it would probably not
>> change.)
>
> The problem with venting at the last minute is it just seems to start
> a long venting return. I didn't wake up 6 months ago and say "Hey lets
> see how I can screw with contributors because they really need an
> enema." I looked over the facts and realized that while we had some
> users of the service we had few long term users. Those who had opened
> blogs but never posted had said they went to a better hosted blog with
> more of their friends on it. We also had done crap for security
> updates and chosen a branch of code that was deader than Hoffa. The
> only thing that has kept it clean has been a lot of heroics from Ricky
> Zhou patching stuff and finding crap at 2am in the morning because
> someone said "hey you got a spammer on deadblog43".
>
> In the end, this was not a foregone conclusion. I laid out what was
> needed to get this going again.
> 1) No last minute heroics.
> 2) More than 1 person running it, conversant in it, etc.
> 3) A laid out plan of what was going to be the sucessor, who was going
> to support it, how they were going to train others, etc
>
> This was said on multiple lists about 6 months ago in order to avoid a
> last minute "Ooooh Fedora screws contributors again." emails and week
> long heroics to keep it up again. If you and/or others have a problem
> with my decision from then, y'all have had multiple months to work on
> 2 and 3 because 1 is non-optional.
>
> --
> Stephen J Smoogen.
> "The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance."
> Randy Nelson, President of Pixar University.
> "Let us be kind, one to another, for most of us are fighting a hard
> battle." -- Ian MacLaren

I didn't mean to start anything - just offered to help if I could :-)

I *will* try to attend the IRC meeting tomorrow at Kevin's invitiation!

jayson