Retiring of blogs.fedoraproject.org

[Stephen John Smoogen]

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