Minutes/2022-09-23

Present: TM, JE, RL

• Administration
  • TM: Salahuddin still has problems posting approved messages to comp.os.linux.announce . TM continuing to provide support. JE and RL suggested that he be referred to Paul Schleck if necessary, who might have further insights.
• Misc
  • Contabo payments: JE clarified that he will make the last payment this month, after which RL will update the account with his own payment details.
  • Meeting with Julian Élie tonight at 19:00 (minutes below).

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Present: TM, JE, Jean-Daniel Dodin (fr.*), Julian Élie (fr.*)

• Members of the various Boards introduced themselves
• JE asked JÉ his thoughts on advising admins on the need to migrate to new signing keys that are compatible with recent versions of GnuPG, and also informing news server admins about the new keys (which require more recent software to read).
  • JÉ responded that he has already created new keys for fr.*, and that whenever he sends a control message to create or remove a newsgroup, he asks users of fr.* to check that their server has processed the control message, and if not, to contact their server admin:

    Si, dans quelques jours, cette modification n'est pas prise en compte sur votre serveur de nouvelles, merci de prendre contact auprès de son administrateur (usuellement via un formulaire de contact sur son site web ou par courrier électronique à <newsmaster@mon-serveur-de-news>, <news@mon-serveur-de-news> ou <usenet@mon-serveur-de-news>) en vous référant, par exemple, à cet article.
    
    Veuillez noter que les articles de contrôle de la hiérarchie sont signés par une nouvelle clef PGP, générée en novembre 2020. Les administrateurs de serveurs de nouvelles souhaitant honorer automatiquement les modifications apportées aux groupes de la hiérarchie doivent donc importer cette nouvelle clef sur leur serveur. Les informations techniques sont accessibles à cette page :
    
    https://www.usenet-fr.net/informations.html

• JE noted that JÉ is one of the INN developers and asked about the software's current development.
  • JÉ replied that there are not many active developers—currently it's mostly him and Russ Allbery. There are still a lot of bug reports and feature requests coming in via the mailing list and GitHub issue tracker but it's not easy to prioritize them. The project needs more help from the community, including for documentation. Anyone can submit patches, and anyone who can write in C, Perl, or shell scripts can potentially contribute. The biggest barrier (especially for those not already familiar with Usenet) is learning and understanding the terminology.
  • JE mentioned that JÉ's YouTube video is very helpful, and that JE shared it on Reddit. JE will advertise for volunteers for INN on the Classic Usenet Reddit.
  • JE said it would be nice to have a configuration tool for INN; something to make it easier to install. Small things like how to set up incoming files tend to take a lot of effort.
  • JÉ said that there are several related packages, like CleanFeed, that are outside INN. It would be interesting to have a news server package that already includes these dependencies or the equivalent functionality.
• JE mentioned that Board members have taken over (Web)STUMP and see that it's causing a lot of trouble for novices.
• JÉ confirmed receipt of TM's reply to his e-mail back in July. JÉ will possibly write back with list of inactive newsgroups.