Debs on MoA's
Open Thread makes a good point, suggesting we better get a move on with our deliberations on where we want to create a new blog/forum, what form it should be in, and once there is a consensus, proceed with setting up the new site.
As he rightly puts forward,
The person who takes on the co-ordination t
eam leader role needs to be located in either europe or amerika so they are close to web servers and the like (there is only one not very fat pipe running in and out of where I live) and in time zones that don't clash with everyone else's when real time communication is necessary.
So, someone or a group of people has to grab the bull by the horns and start operation Moon Evolution. With my rather limited web design skills, apart from irregular posts, the only assistance I can offer is monetary.
What are your thoughts on how to get this project of the ground?
.
41 comments:
Hello Juan, thanks for making this space available.
I'll post the link again on MoA.
Will be back.
Juan-
Thanks again for giving us a place to land... Some good ideas. Between the website I want to develop and now this, I wish I was tech savvy :)
Let try and keep it going.
In order for us to move forward it would be interesting to know if lespeak is beyond repairs, or if it makes sense to give it some time and see if can be resurrected.
DiD mentioned the free wordpress blog he registered recently. I checked out the package on offer and at first glance the application I think would be user friendly enough and sufficiently customisable to create a new forum for the community. In a way it looks similar to blogspot's setup and certainly will have a different feel to it than MoA, but hey, desperate times call for desperate measures.
Re Speakeasy - reviving it is not possible (or so close to not possible as to make it foolish to rely on):
1- I have not yet heard from Okie and have no idea where he is
2- Even if we heard from Okie, he too was limited in what he could do since eff who did the design work did not share access to the database so we cannot restore the site
3- the site uses 4 year old code and would need a serious security update to protect against similar attacks
So we don't have the access needed to fix Speakeasy.
I hope folks set up an alternative - the community is much needed.
siun
that seems to be the last word pn le speakeasy
as i sd - it was a beautiful construction & i imagine our desire to communicate to one another blinded us to the fact that there always needed to be backups for all sorts of reason
i am guiltier than most i think in neglecting to think of that
as to software skill i am as dumb as diogenes
i am extremely joyous that juan found it possible to offer us a halfway house
& i think debs is correct to highlight security concerns
i have visited le speakeasy from time to time in the last few years & it has always been live - it is too much of a coïncidence for it to be attacked precisely at this moment
we have always been a forceful community but also a fragile one, a necessary fragility because we genuinely share different views - something that trolls & detractors never understood or wanted to understand
i think even on iran - it is not like we are apologist for the islamic republic but as has been the case - we must pose questions that may not be comfortable to us - & moon never followed anybody - b led the debate with weeks in front of others, not only georgia, but pakistan - on really a lot of questions
we are not devotees - we bring ourselves & all the attendant problems but it remains a special community, a very special community with a mix of talent that does honour to the word
remembereringgiap
i routinely clean out my cookies - does that mean that if i do so -i'll be obliged to reinitialise
Thanks Juan,
I am willing to pay for a site hosted by networksolutions (assuring good bandwidth) with wordpress as the blog but I have zero time to maintain it regarding articles, links or gateway the comments regarding spam etc. No need for a fancy front end but who has the time to maintain it? Having people register to comment would prevent spam but would inhibit some to join in.
Just curious, does anyone have the time to do a quick adding up of the number of posters who said that they are willing to pay b for his work? I would contribute $50 US$ per month but that is a drop in the bucket.
In any case, I'll help anyone who wants to do something towards making another bar room possible.
I have no money to add, but I do have time - at the least to post comments and help build community - perhaps I can try to do more to build a daily links section. Although I'll probably need some help finding aggregators to do that, and I'm also not certain I could keep it up with less time.
Also, in terms of an ideal discussion-based community, I tend to believe that a combination blog/forum can build community. The immediacy of blogs makes them popular and easy to click around, but they're very difficult to maintain interesting conversations upon. MOA got around this to a certain degree with its prominent links to recent comments.
Forums are much better for having conversations, but they require more critical mass.
What I would like to see ideally - and I'm not certain there's any easily available software that does this - is a blog where each of the new "front-page" posts becomes a forum topic. That way, if something is still worth talking about even after it's off the front page, it'll still be accessible for discussion via the forum.
Le Speakeasy had that to some degree, but I didn't see it enough to see if it worked as well as I'd hoped.
thanks for the layover location, Juan.
i also agree w/ Debs, we need to get a move on. i wish i knew more about the tech-side of things. i know uncle $cam is fairly adept, but he's gone for three weeks.
Debs also brings up the idea of a point-person. i think there are lots of good candidates, and the name that sprung to my mind was anna missed.
do we need to assemble a tech/financial team and content team? enough people in b's farewell thread expressed a willingness to throw down some money, and i can't imagine the monthly costs would be much over a couple hundred dollars, but as i said my tech-mind is underdeveloped.
regarding designing and then coding the front end of a site, if we kept it simple and made sure the ease of communication was a top priority, there's no reason something couldn't be put together by...august? september? it might be good to set some deadlines.
regarding structure, a team of moderators/contributors makes sense. what kind of duties would a moderator need to perform beyond deleting/banning inflammatory trolls, keeping the spam filters clean, etc.
it seems like there is A LOT of technical stuff that probably contributed to b's burnout. we need a structure that still gives a new site a nice form to work within, but enough dispersal of duties to ensure no one gets overwhelmed.
again, thanks Juan. it's great to see folks stopping by a new location; it gives me hope enough of us want to continue this project, and it's so goddamn needed it kind of bothers me.
the media situation is so abysmal it defies description. i'd really like to know what the hell is happening in honduras right now, but everything is michael fucking jackson. and with sarah palin quitting her job on friday, it will take something drastic to break through the corporate filters.
let's do this thing before too much time passes.
debs thought part 1 (this blog limits our contributions so after brainstorming a bit I have to split this missive up):
Well that is a few more. some of the peeps posting here will have received a sort of email/chain letter thing began yesterday in the home that passing it around the community through an 'off the board route' may provoke some urgency as well as allowing us to ruminate and debate with a modicum of discretion.
I take Juan's point about the wordpress free system being fairly good and similar to blogger.com, if not quite as corporatised, but I have the same reservations about either.
That is they are lowest common denominator products designed to suit fairly simple configurations, so if we want to go beyond that we will struggle. I also suspect that bandwidth may be an issue during times of heavy traffic. That is to say when something awful happens most of us saw how much greater the foot traffic would get at MoA, well during those times it has been difficult to get on to some free blogs just because very one is accessing a finite resource at once.
That is without even going in to the other stuff the issues of surveillance control and censorship that could arise in a difficult time.
But we are still limited by our abilities and it may eventuate that a free blog is all we can adequately manage initially.
Which brings us to the next issue - the domain name. If we use a free blog in the simplest way our address will be part of the free blog's domain and therefore moving should it become necessary will become fraught.
However it is likely that we can initially register an address and use that to 'kick peeps on' to the blog so that problem isn't completely insoluble.
The next issue is hosting if we don't use a free service. Rick mentioned network solutions as a host, I haven't been involved in any build outside my country so I defer to others on the best most affordable and practical solution. However there is one issue that concerns me that may or may not be such a concern to others I am happy to go along with what is decided by the group.
That is that commercial involvement on the internet means dealing with megacorps some of whom have questionable practices, this isn't an anti amerika rant. I don't care whether the corporation is based in the us, europe, england or china as long as it doesn't use it's profits to fuck humans up.
So suggestions about hosts and the suitability of network solutions (which is probably fine) from both a technical/practical and ethical view are welcome as long as we don't let them hold us up. We have to build momentum here.
Part 2 from debsisdead:
I favour open source software to build the back and front ends of the thing (I'm sorry Giap I will try not to make this too technical and put some links in that may help explain) because the open source ideal has the spirit of much of what we write about and as the link says it is far less expensive than buying commercial packages. The other alternative just helping ourselves to commercial appz is a bit fraught for what we want to do in this day and age and leaves peeps exposed to nasties.
But open source isn't all wonderful either as I have just discovered when researching WordPress which up until that point had been my #1 choice for blogging software. Wordpress is particularly vulnerable to SQL injection exploits of the type which knocked over leSpeak.
However last night I dug through my swag of IT e-books and found one on Drupal. This is the open source system most peeps will have encountered on wiki sites, but it also supports many blogs.
It has a better reputation than WordPress for security but probably lacks the range of blog site templates that WordPress has meaning we will need to get someone on board who can put together a website, quite possibly from scratch.
I will download Drupal later after I have attended to the family (the real world intrudes at the most inopportune moments) and have a bit of a play on a virtual platform. NE1 familiar with Drupal step to the front please.
However this stuff is not my area of expertise I am better writing about IT than building it and my knowledge of SQL is limited to a database concepts 100 course I completed at the local Institute of Technology (Community College) ie not very great at all.
But we really need to move out of our comfort zones (as a sports coach would put it) so I will have a go as long as others do too.
A plan for the interim could be:
(i)settle on a name for the site , and a domain name.
(ii)register them
(iii) grab some server space and create the domain on it
(iv)initially use the server to kick peeps to a free blog site while we build our own
(V) try to get two groups of us working in parallel to design and build the front of the site and the other to design and build the backend.
To get this far we will need two people in the northern hemisphere who can work together (ie time zones not too divergent) we need someone to handle the financial stuff and the other to deal with domain registration etc.
If we only have one it could work but since this is meant to be a co-operative venture lets try and spread the workload a bit eh.
Lizard made the excellent suggestion of anna missed for a leadership/co-ordination role and I would like to add to that by nominating Rick Happ as well. I haven't asked Rick (don't even have his email addy) but if he is willing I would like to nominate him to get the host and register the domain.
We need suggestions for names like, now.
Just before lespeakeasy was hacked, I had registered and received an email from the site confirming my registration. If the site was hacked, what could possibly be the worst outcome from someone having my registration info?
picking a domain name could be a tricky task. i really liked the name lespeakeasy, because it seemed like a good fit for our ragtag community of commentators.
how about something incorporating moonshine? or anything that retains moon for associative purposes?
i also kind of like alabama's suggestion, brechtfast club.
or we could branch out. for some reason edgewise popped into my head.
other suggestions?
@ David as far as I know you shouldn't suffer any adverse effects, if there were any they would most likely be increased spam but even that is fairly remote.
We are all in the same boat on that, I registered right before too and I certainly haven't picked up anything.
debs: +1 on Drupal (and it has the advantage of a quite friendly support community). It has a steep learning curve though. It has been a while since I used, but if you need help to put a nice & simple presentation layer together, I'll do my best (phiw13 _at_ gmail.com).
Otoh, if a more 'canned' solution is needed, Typepad is more attractive/safer than Wordpress.com (MOA was/is on Typepad).
Maybe we could amend alabama's suggestion to "brechtfast bistro" so as not to lose the cachet of alcoholic beverages and the consumption of same.
The Brechtfast Pub? Just thinking out loud.
@philippe thanks for your comments on Drupal. It is likely that what ever we do will have a steep learning curve, given most of us are relatively inexperienced. I will know more about the incline after I test it out this evening on a virtual IIs platform I have here, a hangover from a previous project.
Though by all accounts Drupal is best on an apache server which is where we will likely end up.
Typepad is solid too but the appealing thing about Drupal is the ability to evolve past the great site b built into something more interactive.
For those interested Drupal overview which if it performs as advertised would give us the ability to evolve into something really great.
However we have to walk before we go running.
Although Philippe, I have grabbed your email addy gratefully in the event we do pick Drupal.
Hello to all the folks huddling together in this virtual bomb-shelter. As an acquaintace said to me recently, "The trouble with anarchists is that they
can't get organized". I hope that we can
disprove that theory here or in "our future home". One of the most depressing aspects of the hacking of Le Speakeasy is the fact that it forces us to think about "self-defense" and "security" rather than
free expression and mutual respect.
Good News! Check the Open Thread at Moon. OkieByAccident has landed and says he's going to try and recover le speakeasy and is enlisting someone to help him with the technical side of the problem.
What sort of interactivity do you need, when everyone at MoA interacted directly? It was that format that made everyone so close.
Any blog setup allows for pages as well as posts, so you can set up pages for separate items. Wordpress has a great explanation for the difference between posts and pages.
Wordpress are open source and cover their costs.
They of course also offer a service for payment.
Pop on over to Wordpress...even if you don't use them, they're a fount of information for tricky questions
http://wordpress.com/
Typepad is nice too.
The beauty of MoA is the simplicity.
I go over to Rigorous intuition, which is a forum and probably miss lots of good stuff because I can't be bothered going past the first page. Flaming appears to be inherent in forum formats too.
So, please, whatever you do, consider KISS and don't bog the place down with too much gadgetry that detracts from what brought you all together in the first place.
Modern sites backrooms are easy to maintain and better if a team does it to relieve burn out, even if some are only standby for when someone goes on holidays etc.
I'd be quite happy to assist with the admin, maybe once a site has been started up (don't have enough confidence yet to set up a site for anyone but myself, though I probably could)
Anyway, that's two bob's worth from this longtime, twice posting lurker of MoA.
(Still have the Whiskey Bar link in my favourites...though it goes nowhere... and MoA will remain in the list too)
Oh...I can be contacted at:
leslie53 at bigpond dot com
Can't help with the technical end but I have some spare time for moderation / occasional posts and will pay a subscription or whatever.
My first thought was The Moon Shines - very obvious - and I actually opened up a forum with that name, just to see how that worked (free forum org) and was not happy with it at all (before I saw Juan's offer.) later, I looked up that name, and besides it being very common - books, music etc.- there are already several forums, blogs, with names that incorporate Moon-Shines, such as the Moonshine Café, etc. Moon will only be good if couples with something infrequent and improbable.
We don't know what we need until we discuss the alternatives and if we are going to build a new site we should consider all our options before we begin which means that people need to know what those options are.
They also need to know that wordpress is considered insecure code compared to some of the others on offer. (check out the discussion in comments about hosted Vs build yourself sites) If we are going to build a site we should at least look at issues of security because it is heartbreaking when people devote time and energy to a project only to see it wrecked. Not even by anyone malicious or someone trying to make a statement in a destructive way but just because a bot prowling the cloud probing for insecurities discovered the site and wrecked it because it could.
But I don't see any purpose in debating the intricacies of the site until it is decided whether there is sufficient interest by sufficient people to build one.
As I said initially we can use an existing site or build a free site at wordpress but we must be prepared for problems during peak times and be aware that we aren't truly independent. If that is what people decide - fine.
Towards the end of MoA the decisions made by typepad in the interests of moderating bandwidth usage caused a deal of confusion and dissension. It became impossible to post long missives without admin privileges, no more than 2 hypertext links per post were possible - then in the last couple of weeks if you took too long to compose your post it would be rejected out of hand.
This placed b under even more pressure as people tried to post by email and some even took to holding b accountable for things largely beyond his control.
These blogger com blogs have a limit of 4096 characters for any reply, which is fine most of the time, but then it's not sometimes.
How can the community make an informed decision unless it is informed of alternatives?
Debs...great points. I guess it boils down to - one gets what one pays for...peanuts and monkeys and all that.
I know these blogger sites have huge problems with comments when traffic becomes heavy.
Anyway, I'm happy to contribute what I can financially for some independence, and give some time (though I'm no guru, but a fast learner) for maintenance.
My impression is that the initial building of the site will require the most effort, and is a task not easily shared. But once the forum/blog is up and running, the actual comment monitoring itself is not that time consuming and doesn't require the same skill level as designing the site.
Are there enough of us interested in building a new site? Well, even if we do decide to go down the independent open source coding path but don't have the necessary technical expertise to construct it ourselves, going by the comments left at the MoA there seems to be certainly a sufficient number of moonbats keen on seeing this change over through to let the collection hat go around and use the funds to have one professionally build.
Having said that, with Okie back on deck I reckon there is a chance we can save ourselves the trouble of building one from scratch. Maybe we could channel some dollars his way to have lespeak cleaned up and recoded to be hack-proof.
I just posted a long post but I worry I had the wrong tab open and I posted it to some other web blog!! Well anyway, I only suggested Network Solutions because of reliability and bandwidth concerns and also that is what I use. I doubt their hands are totally "clean" as they had a monopoly with the government with domain name registrations years ago but maybe we shouldn't be too scrupulous at the moment. They are more expensive also, but I would be happy to pay for it. In the alternative I will send a check to someone to pay for 1 year domain registration and hosting if the group wishes some other hosting place or let me know and I can try to get it done and will pay for it. Any of the domain names discussed so far are OK with me. Network Solutions has a hosting package deal with 24 hr tech support and templates for wordpress - easy to change and ready to go. I am only buying the real estate and don't wish to furnish, supervise or manage our new bar. I am a little worried about liability with what's posted though. I haven't read their terms of agreement. We all know there is no longer free speech, even on the Internet. Anyways, if someone else wants to register/host it let me know and I'll send some money.
Just read the comments about LeSpeakeasy at MOA. That would be best if it can be restored securely. I like the name also.
PS If soemone wishes to contact me use rick@pamlico.org
rapt checking in here.
Thanks juan moment for offering your space.
Pleased to see so much follow-up energy here, especially as time seems to be accelerating toward a showdown of some kind. Every day is new and interesting.
I can't offer tech help but there looks to be plenty of that already available. You can look to me for some $$ support as long as my business survives - I mean some nominal monthly dues or the like.
One idea: those who set this thing up again should remember that Bernhard was the central personality in MOA; he made it work. Rule by committee may not be as effective. Just sayin.
Love to all, rapt
@rapt You are correct of course which is why we need to place sufficient trust in someone to put them in a decision making position. As I said at the start it will be better to be someone from the Northern Hemisphere who has some time and some expertise. That is certainly the case if we opt to build a site from scratch which is very appealing in some ways but it is going to take time and effort.
However if LeSpeakeasy can be restored to some semblance of order, then we have more time to consider the options and a place to keep the community alive while building something else.
Thank goodness Juan has allowed us this venue because it is vital we do keep talking and hopefully we will reach some sort of consensus on what we want.
Love and money from me where needed.
-beq
Nice place Juan.
http://www.paltelegraph.com/palestine/gaza-strip/1261-former-us-congresswoman-speaks-out-of-her-jail-in-israel
aha! here you are.
in many cases it's easier to build from scratch than to try to rewrite someone else's code at le speakeasy. but either of those options would require a developer/programmer/designer (preferably of team of such) with an adequate amount of time & the resources to mockup, unit test & solicit feedback on the project before going live. and preferably pro-bono or for a substantial cut from the normal shop rates.
and which, depending on how complicated the software, could take a fair amount of time to deliver. as in weeks.
we sorta tried that route w/ LS & then a quick, simple, straightforward blog went up in a couple hours & essentially rendered all that collaborative effort moot. and now LS is a maintenance nightmare - missing access rights; an old, exploitable codebase; etc...
as b wrote in that 2004 comment that i lifted to the 'goodbye' thread, sometimes it's best to just get something quick & dirty - the details/evolution can be hammered out in future releases (as in version 2, 3, and so on).
i have never evaluated the blogging & forum frameworks out there so i leave that up to those in the know, but i lean toward not trying to reinvent the wheel here.
how big is our active community going to be in the initial period? are people expecting moa redux, or many of the same voices in a new light? do we need to continue our conversations in a meeting hall, or will a subterranean tavern do for now, as we shape out a new path?
unless the new site starts knocking them out of the park from the gitgo, i'm not convinced that bandwith issues wrt heavy traffic is something we need worry over at this point. just my humble opinion.
how many people will actually create front page posts? b solicited the community for such many times over the years & very few times did anyone take him up on it. i'm not trying to come across as negative here, just realistic - the audience for these media are weighted heavily toward lurkers & commentators rather than content creators.
so i lean toward KISS, as leslieM put it earlier, in the transitory phase, and take advantage of an existing, peer-tested, supported, blog framework.
and then, if consensus really wants to build a new application from scratch or a more elaborate, existing framework, that could be worked on in parallel to the place already up & running w/ the idea w/ the idea that at some point either the two will merge or there will be a transition to the new space. that way there wouldn't be as much pressure on the development team.
my 2 cents
I would write one article a week if others were also helping out in such a fashion. I would rather do it only once every two weeks if enough people were on board with it.
However, I write to ask why we could not take over MoA instead. Why not? It is working, and was not hacked up in all those years. It looks much like Billmon's place and that is its charm.
Over there, maybe "b" and Billmon both would pop in for a comment once in a while if invited.
I bet "b" would allow a takeover; anyone ask him?
http://www.indymedia.ie/oscailt/
this works really well, is secure and well documented and might be of use
i'm no techie and can do most maintenance including blocking ips easily with it.
it by default does not log ips of users
heads up - b has a post up on how to get the official moon of alabama archive cd
I hope Okie and Dan of Steele have success cleaning out the LeSpeakeasy.org site ... it is quite nice.
Some rude boy has found a way to hijack the "below the fold" topic detail pages.
Okie, if you still have my email please get in touch, I know a bit more php now and might be able to help out.
This may be a documented hack on the phpBB backend ... anyone have any knowledge or ideas?
jonku,
I left you a private message at LS. I need a file to make it work like it did before. If we can't get the file from an older backup it will take a bit more time to figure out what was in it.
the database is intact, only one page was changed and the site is still vulnerable until we can get it upgraded to version 3. hope to do that this weekend.
dan
Juan, thank you again for having us here while we were homeless. I leave with a quote from a recent Eduardo Galeano interview,
Q: From where do you draw the fortitude to continue your resistance to the amnesia your books work to dispel?
A: Because I enjoy it, it is a pleasure. I don't live it as a duty, I live it as a pleasure. If it would be a duty, the result would be entirely different. If you don't feel pleasure, you are not able to give it. If you don't give pleasure, readers will run away, because they have the right to receive beauty and humor, even if you are telling terrible stories, otherwise they wouldn't be really alive. When a book is alive, really alive, you feel it. You put it to your ear here, and you feel it breathe, sometimes laugh, sometimes cry, just like a person, a little person.
See you over at Le Speakeasy!
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