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Hi everyone, I wanted to give you guys the heads up that I plan to finish the last step of my “retirement” from online Mormonism this year. I haven’t been participating in the discussions for several years, but was still occasionally handling administrator functions and server maintenance. I feel like it’s time to step down from that too. I really don’t have a connection to this world anymore.
I still feel like this community is important though. You all have continued to provide a valuable and Christ-like ministry to fellow Mormons who find themselves in faith crisis. You are doing a good work.
The main thing that needs to happen is for me to hand over control of the hosting account to someone else. As a reminder, I “own” the server account but John Dehlin owns the domain name. John has never shown interest in letting go of that domain ownership, so there has always been that odd combination of ownership of this site. The only costs now is the annual fee for hosting services, which is around $134.00 for the whole year paid in 1 payment. I pay that myself, but the past several years Open Stories Foundation has reimbursed me for that expense. In exchange, I used to make an annual fundraising post asking people to donate to the Open Stories Foundation. I don’t know if this arrangement will continue. John hasn’t responded to my emails this year. I will probably make one more push with him, but I’m not really worried about the money. I’m doing OK financially right now. If I have to eat this year’s costs, that’s OK.
At some point, you guys probably need to resolve the ownership and control situation. You would also have to figure out how to fund the site, and find someone to help with the tech side of maintaining the software and day-to-day tech issues raised by users. It’s not a lot. And I’m no tech whiz, just a lifelong, self-taught computer nerd. The phpBB forums and WordPress site are standard, pretty straight forward for a sys admin to handle.
So that’s what is going on. I am not disappearing immediately. I just wanted to give you guys as much notice as possible. I could probably hang around until close to the end of the year when my work schedule goes nuts again.
Thank you Brian for all that you have done throughout the years. Thank you also for giving the group as much notice as possible to form a sort of succession plan. Thanks, Brian. What a long strange trip it’s been.
Thanks for everything you’ve done and for carrying the site this far. You’ve made a positive difference in how people experience this life, it’s significant. I also thank you for all you’ve done and your contributions over the years. I hope we can maintain what you started. I echo everyone’s thanks. Love you, friend. Is anyone else we currently have capable of doing what Brian has been doing? I know I am not.
If not, does anyone have any suggestions for someone outside our current group who would be a good fit and could take over these responsibilities?
Brian, thanks for all of this. Our little island of misfits has been a treasure in people’s lives. Thanks for doing it. Pop in once and a while and say “Hi”. Old Timer wrote:
Is anyone else we currently have capable of doing what Brian has been doing? I know I am not.
I can… Kinda.
I wrote a very simple php website that students at a university could use to log hours they worked on their design projects and to review their teammates. It was amateurish, had a few spots that were subject to sql injection attacks that I never got around to addressing, and it was over 15 years ago. I got a different job doing something completely different, meaning I’m a long time removed from the game.
From what I’ve pieced together:
1) phpbb is an as-is package. You just drop files on a server capable of running php.
2) There’s only a small number of php files that have been altered from the standard phpbb release. I think the only edits to php files were to include the question on the new user registration page.
3) There are probably other files that deviate from the standard release, ones I don’t know about. Config files and the like.
Assumptions:
1) For the most part you don’t have to worry about editing php files. It’s 99% standard phpbb.
Unknowns/worries:
1) Where does the database live? How is it maintained? Is is backed up? Is there a process for restoring a backup if there’s a catastrophic failure?
2) On the subject of catastrophic failures, it would be nice to know how to take the site from an empty folder up to the point it is running as-was:
a) Copying over the phpbb files.
b) Restoring an archived DB
That way if there was some error to end all errors, there was a way to resurrect things.
Other:
I notice that there’s an update for our version of phpbb. StayLDS is at version 3.2.1 and version 3.2.7 is available. Maybe a good transition activity for whoever ends up taking over would be to go through the update process. I know it could be a pain because when you’re retiring the last thing you want to do is to do the most annoying thing about the job one last time, but it might help because whoever takes over will need to know how to upgrade going forward and it would be an opportunity to identify the files/particulars that are unique to StayLDS’s version of phpbb.
Other people currently at StayLDS that might: LookingHard and dande
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