Minutes/2020-05-22

From Usenet Big-8 Management Board

Present: RL, JE, TM

General financial/organizational matters

The meeting discussed RL's second written report on the requirements for incorporating or for registering as a charity in the UK. Incorporation does not confer any tax benefits, and registering as a charity requires 50% of the trustees to be resident in the UK. It was agreed to abandon any further investigation of forming a legal entity for the time being, and instead continue to operate as an informal group.

Wiki

The albasani.net web server hosting the Board's official wiki is still down. Kathy Morgan and Bill Horne have been in touch with Roman Racine and asked him to get in touch with us so that we can migrate the wiki to our new host. However, he hasn't done so yet, possibly because he is busy recovering from the server crash. It was agreed to wait another week or two.

Signing keys for control messages

TM reported on an ongoing thread on news.admin.hierarchies and news.software.nntp (see news:r6chgv$dam$1@news.trigofacile.com regarding migrating to newer, stronger PGP keys. Russ Alberry, who handles these technical aspects on behalf of the Board, is participating.

News admins

TM reported that a poster with the handle U.ee has been producing PNG and PDF maps of news servers: news:r6qs03$1omd$1@news.usenet.ee These might come in handy for our further work in contacting news admins.

Panix

TM reported on his initial survey of the Panix setup. There is a .procmailrc account with recipes that shunt mail to various sinks: some mail was forwarded to individual Board members, some is placed in mailboxes in $HOME/Mail, mail for moderated newsgroups gets sent to various moderators and STUMP installations, and some gets sent to the bit bucket. TM changed the recipes that forward messages to individual board members so that they instead send to board@big-8.org. TM to contact Paul Schlenk to ask about his role in maintaining the account and whether he can give us any introduction/advice. RL to start also investigating the Panix account and the STUMP documentation at <http://igor.chudov.com/stump/>.