Minutes/2026-04-23
From Usenet Big-8 Management Board
Present: TM, RL, MM
- Infrastructure
- The Board discussed the hosting requirements circulated by e-mail. TM to ask Panix whether its VPS services provide the features we need.
- Software/funding
- The meeting noted donations to the Board's Open Collective account by Board members and Julien Élie, which are sufficient to cover the Board's outstanding expenses. (TM has already submitted his expense claims; RL to do so soon.) TM to send a note of thanks to Julien on behalf of the Board.
- RL and MM approved TM's draft finances article; TM to post it to news.groups
and news.admin.misc . - TM asked whether the Board should continue posting announcements to its Facebook pages and X profile, as they do not seem to have attracted any engagement. RL noted that the Facebook pages at least have followers. Agreed that TM would post messages to the Facebook pages and X profiles indicating that the Board is considering shuttering them and asking for followers to confirm whether they are reading.
- Misc
- The Board continued discussion of whether/how it was desirable to alter the process by which new members are added. There was no consensus that any changes were immediately required, and it was suggested that the sort of inconclusive result observed in the recent RfD might be avoided in the future with access to more information on existing archiving initiatives, and to more quantitative information on servers that carry the Big 8, whether obtained passively/automatically (e.g., how many there are; how many articles originate from them and from how many users; whether their TLS certificates are valid; whether they have RFC 2142 or other posted contact information; etc.) or actively (e.g., writing to the admins to ask about their control message policies).
