Re: Proposal: New web site maintainers

[Stroller <..hidden..>]

On 4 Oct 2010, at 18:14, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> On Sun, 2010-10-03 at 12:06 -0700, John Locke wrote:
>> "Hi,
> 
>> I hope you will consider this proposal -- we like LedgerSMB and want
>> to see it succeed.
> 
> I am not really interested in moving the site but I am certainly
> interested in having people contribute to the success of it.

I'm not sure it's relevant what the current "maintainers" of the site are "interested" in.

I wrote to the -devel list twice last year to bring to your attention the amount of spam on there. My message was ignored in January, and of the two replies made in June, I don't think either of them was from an actual LedgerSMB dev.

The current LedgerSMB devs - and I assume that includes yourself - have demonstrated that they're not capable stewards of the website.

I'm not saying that as a criticism, because I'm not much interested in designing or maintaining websites myself, just that you should let the job go to someone who will manage the site properly. 

> I even put out a call for people to help us in the past.

When I search my archive for messages from your email address and containing the word "site" I'm able to find messages going back to 2006, but not these alleged calls for help.

> I have disabled the comments for now. People should be using the mailing
> list anyway.

In which case the site should have long ago been redesigned or reconfigured so that comments are not shown or solicited. You shouldn't be disabling them as a reactionary tactic, but thought should have been put into the purpose of the website in the first place. It became a total mess of spam and an embarrassment.

A couple of years ago (25 January 2008 23:55:47 GMT) you announced that "541 community members [had] sign[ed] up on the site". That seems like a total joke, considering you say yourself that mailing lists are the preferred means of communication and the volume here. I doubt if we have 50 unique addresses posting here. Those "541 community members" were clearly all spammers - if a few of them were genuine users then they surely ended up frustrated and unable to get help from the site.

The spam seems to have disappeared now - I assume this was done wholesale when you disabled comments? - however we still have misspelled and nonsensical articles like this as mainpage "news" stories: http://ledgersmb.org/node/80

Stroller.