catching up

Wow, it's been a long time! I forgot about the blog. Where were we in the drama? Ah, yes. At the end of August, I decided to walk away from evolt.org. Which fired up activity on theforum for a month or so.

Alan Lloyd and David Kaufman stepped up to take my place. Alan had some "revolutionary" ideas and was slapped down for them which lead to his leaving.

At that point, I was happily on "vacation" from evolt.org just checking the list archives to see if the momentum was dying out, enjoying my free time, and actually hanging out in IRC more than when I was fully engaged in evolt.org. Then Tara had to ruin it all by giving me the volunteer of the year award which forced me back into evolt.org.

The first thing to do was figure out the mailing list problems and get a handle on the spam. Hence, the qmail-scanner-queue mod that allowed us to scan for virii and spam without degrading server performance too much. Followed up by a list change to prevent us from sending bounce messages to spammers which flooded the outgoing message queue. The most useful change was adding an extra set of qmail-smtpd processes that handled outgoing messages from lists.evolt.org only. This meant outgoing list traffic wouldn't get mixed up with incoming messages and would give a "priority" to getting actual list messages out to subscribers. This helped a lot. We still get the odd problem where spammers flood our incoming connection but it's a lot better now.

Next problem, comment handling on articles which currently doesn't have a resolution. And there's always loose ends: d.e.o still shut down, wiki upgrading, new theme, Drupal upgrade, performance issues, article approval, comment spam, new user spam, list spam, b.e.o, mirrors broken, etc.

Boy, I'm glad that I'm back! ;)