2004.06.20 Meeting Notes

Officer's Meeting

House Agriculture, Davis

Topics

• Linux Distributions in Lending Library
  We have purged the Lending Library of all Linux installation discs and other software, since they were all outdated and rarely borrowed. Any collection of Linux distros will focus on usage at Installfests.

• Society for Technical Communicators
  After many tries at finding enough volunteers to staff a Linux booth at this event, Bill Kendrick is giving up and will tell them we cannot make it this year.

• LinuxWorld Expo
  We need to make sure we find volunteers for a LUGOD booth at LWE. It may make sense to create a sign-up form to place out at upcoming meetings. We may want to consider providing incentives for volunteers, or at the least emphasizing the incentives we already receive from LWE (like passes, discounts, etc.). Such incentives will be first-come, first-served for volunteers.

  We might want to coordinate travel (like 10-ride Amtrak passes which could be used by 5 different people), hotel and other accomodations, and access to other events happening during LWE. (Of course, LUGOD won't be able to pay for these, but we can help coordinate.)

• Picnix13
  It doesn't seem to make much sense to try and coordinate Davis/Sacramento volunteers for staffing much of Picnix (and they typically seem well-staffed to begin with), so LUGOD is considering focusing on promotion of the event. Henry has okayed spending $50.00 on flyer photocopies, and knows an inexpensive copier in Berkeley. (6c/sheet, at two-flyers per sheet, comes out to over 1600 flyers.) These flyers can be distributed to LUGs and at our booth at LinuxWorld. (We may even be able to get reimbursed for this expense by whomever sponsors Picnix13.)

  We should try to coordinate carpooling from the Davis/Sacramento region, as well as make sure other LUGs know about, and help promote, the event.

• Mailing List Archives
  We have been asked to edit our mailing list archives to remove a member's e-mail address (to reduce their potential of being spammed). This became a discussion on the current state of our list archives, and plans for change:
  • Pipermail archives messages as they are delivered to list members by Mailman. The archives live at lists.lugod.org. Their main disadvantage is that the pages do not look like the rest of the LUGOD.org website, and lack navigation links to the rest of the site content.
  • Mhonarc archives messages as they come in, and are susceptible to archiving messages which were never delivered to the list (like spam!). The archives live as HTML files at www.lugod.org/mailinglists/archives.
  • We will dump Mhonarc and use only Pipermail archives. We will try to make the Pipermail pages look like the rest of the site, but it is not a major loss if this is difficult. (However, Pipermail is written in Python, so it should be reasonable to find someone who can help, if an Apache or PHP solution cannot be found.)
  • We will mask all e-mail addresses in the Pipermail archives (e.g., to "xxx@xxx.xxx" or something similar). The point of the archives is not to find people's e-mail addresses, but to read interesting posts and find solutions to technical problems.

• E-mail addresses on Members pages
  The discussion of e-mail address masking in the mailing lists archives brought up the "MAPS" ('spam', backwards) address munging used on the members page, and how that is not user-friendly (though so far has seemed to prevent harvesting of addresses from the members pages.) We didn't come up with a suitable solution to make the addresses both easy to use, but also hard to harvest. We will ask members via the mailing lists what they think we should do.

• HTML e-mail rejection
  Numerous complaints of HTML posts to our mailing lists have been made recently, so we began looking into an SMTP-time solution for bouncing such posts automatically (so that a personal reply is unnecessary... so that people don't feel they're being picked on, especially new members). Unfortunately, since LUGOD shares the server with other users, it doesn't look easy to do. Mailman was recently upgraded, so a solution might be possible there.

• Dynamic IP rejection
  LUGOD's server now rejects client IPs that do not resolve (via reverse DNS lookup) to a hostname. Members with difficulty posting to the list can request to be whitelisted. A note will be posted to the mailing list pages, on the main web page, and to the vox-announce list.

Attendance

• Emily Stumpf (root)
• Henry House (/dev/null)
• Bill Kendrick (Public Relations officer)
• Dmitriy Ivanov