>>> The FTSC could always be disbanded if it cannot serve its purpose? RS>> Just so long as the web-site is kept up, I don't see much RS>> difference. ac> I have no strong opinion on whether the FTSC should still exist, but ac> the FTSC web site's operation as a document repository has long been ac> superceded by superiour web hosts where that is their primary purpose,
The difference is only in their popularity. Obvious enough, the FTN documents are not something that consumes many resourses - there are just some requests per day served from nginx RAM cache (yes, I have plenty of memory there).
ac> like SourceForge, GitHub and GitLab.
These are primarily the git repositories. I'd be happy to use git for all our needs several years ago (when I was a member of the FTSC), but some old farts appeared unable to learn ever more simple things than git and gpg.
ac> So to save on hosting costs
I wouldn't go bankrupt whether I'd spend 0.01 RUB on it again. I have a number of servers with a plenty of resources, so those 17 Mb for the ${subj} are very hard to notice in a total load.
ac> (and the risk of ftsc.org expiring etc)
This is the only real risk.
ac> I suggest decomissioning the current FTSC web site and hosting ac> all the FTSC documents on GitHub, and uploading a snapshot to ac> Archive.org.
GitHub is distrusted (they are known to wipe whole projects due to politically "unreliable" people rarticipating there), so it could serve only as a mirror. Anyway, to do that we have to start using git, so here's a question: out of all candidates, who is familiar with it?
ac> Then if anyone still wants to go to the trouble of keeping the ac> ftsc.org domain & web site alive they can redirect web visitors to ac> the GitHub repo instead.
Fidonet is didstributed, so should be the storage. Git seems to be a good solution, but we should avoid using any and all centralized services.
Once we had the fidonet.net domain. In order to keep people away from using it as the only source of actual connection information, we had to let it expire (some people, including me, knew all the necessary bank reqs, but nobody had paid for it) and being squatted.
Current ${subj} is a bit unfriendly to a search engines, but it's very friendly to mirroring software like wget. That's not what we could have with git, but it allows anyone to keep their own FTSC documents archive.
ac> The Wikipedia entry for FidoNet could also point to both the ac> GitHub repo and archive.org snapshot, since they're fairly relevant.
Seems unwise. Keeping ftsc.org and adding some mirrors would be mush better.
ac> Hosting all the FTSC documents on GitHub would be particularly useful ac> since it would allow anyone to write bug reports or file "issues" ac> relating to the various FidoNet standards documents, which may help ac> any future developers. (Or historians...)
"FidoNet is our primary mode of communication" // (q)
So all reports should go here, to the FTSC_PUBLIC echoarea. Also, git can work over a netmail...
ac> Spoken as a former maintainer of the ftsc.org web site, several years ac> ago.
Answering as a current hoster of it, just now :-)
ac> I see it's still using the same layout and colour scheme. :)
I've changed (wrote new) only the documents listing engine.
-- Alexey V. Vissarionov aka Gremlin from Kremlin gremlin.ru!gremlin; +vii-cmiii-ccxxix-lxxix-xlii
