Dear fellow linux audio/multimedia enthusiasts,
It's been some time since I officially addressed the entire la* community. This has been in great part because things just worked. Robin, who has in great part been the mastermind behind a number of initiatives currently being hosted on the lao server has officially stepped down a year ago (even though I still tend to bug him way too often ;-) as the sys admin and while we have a couple additional volunteers helping man the server, it appears that we really need someone who will step in just like Robin did to help me carry the burden of maintaining this huge ecosystem of sites and pages. More so, it appears that some pages have been covered with spam/non-working content, and given the current state of lack of adequate manpower to manage these, my immediate response is to shut down ladspavst page which is currently in an awful state of disrepair, filled with non-working content and spam. The very fact it's taken me this long to spot it speaks to the fact that I alone cannot keep up with everything that is happening on the site. This is particularly important because if this gets any further out of hand, the University may decide that the content hosted on these pages goes against the very grain of what a taxpayer-run site should be hosting and we may lose what has been so far a very generous no-limits hosting. To put this in perspective, we've been burning steadily 1-2TB per month. For this reason, in the interest of our great multi-site ecosystem, I will be pulling down any sites that are not actively maintained and that also have submitable user content (read: ability to receive unfiltered spam). If anyone wishes to step up and maintain any of these, in order to avoid any further mishaps like the one with ladspavst, I would like to propose that from now on all the admins submit monthly blurbs assuring me that everything is indeed being managed as it should be. This will certainly help avoid situations like the one currently with ladspavst which is also not the first time we've had problems with that site. I can and will gladly bat for us to get us more hosting space and processing power, but this will be heavily contingent on ensuring that our site is not hosting anything that is potentially offensive or outright inappropriate. This does not mean that we should not have passionate discussions on our mailing lists, but at the same time I think one would be hard-pressed to convince anyone that links to questionable chemical substances or worse yet inappropriate content is something that will help us continue to enjoy this wonderful service.
You all have been a part of this wonderful community and you all have in many ways helped shape it into something truly amazing. Let's make sure that we don't lose this in this process. My hope is that we will keep most (all?) sites intact. But the reality is that we simply currently do not have the adequate manpower to maintain all of it. More so, the server has had its instabilities that we're trying to address and on top of that soon we'll be forced to upgrade to a new KVM system as our University's infrastructure transitions to its new and better iteration. This transition will be by no means a small feat if we are to maintain an uninterrupted service and is something that will undoubtedly require your help. If anyone is interested and willing to assist in this process, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Best wishes,
ico
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