[TriLUG] Trilug -- Current Status

[Alan Porter via TriLUG]

Hi Bill,

I will take ownership of the steering@ email address being closed to 
non-member submissions.  That was me.

A little background.  I set up pilot from scratch back in February of 
2009 after someone hacked the old Mandrake-based server.

The story - https://alanporter.com/blog/2009-03-01/pwn3d

Since then, we have not had a whole lot of volunteer interest in 
maintaining our "cluster of one".  Occasionally we'll get a wave of 
enthusiasm around upgrading or migrating or splitting our single server. 
But we never made it over that hump.  For this reason, pilot is still 
running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Then, since COVID, we moved meetings to be virtual only.  Attendance 
has been pretty low.  And so we lost our cadence of having a planned 
meeting topic each month.  And donations.  And outreach.  And new 
membership.

Likewise, the main mailing list traffic fell to only 272 messages for 
all of 2023 (that's 23 messages per month).

Either we were not meeting the community's needs, or the need itself 
was dwindling.

At the same time, the steering committee and perpetual lurkers would 
receive a dozen or so spam messages every day on the SC mailing list.  
And then this spring, the number went to the hundreds per day.  Also, 
some mail services started refusing connections from pilot.  We 
definitely had an active email problem.  Thanks to one member who 
volunteered to investigate what might be the root cause.  We're all 
busy.

I can count on my fingers the number of general LUG request emails I 
have received on my trilug.org address.  But I have 9449 spam emails 
addressed to the SC.  So a few weeks ago, I made the decision to block 
email from/to sys at trilug.org and to close the SC mailing list to only 
members and the allow-list.

I am sorry that your question fell on deaf ears, and that our web site 
did not contain current contact information.  I am also sorry to see the 
interest in the LUG wane.  But I am not going to try to force it back 
into being popular.

If the LUG wants these things updated, we need some volunteers to do 
it.

Alan Porter
volunteer
SC member 2008-2013
TriLUG registered agent
trilug.org domain contact