[Imc-tech] imc tech notes 8-21-02

[Paul Riismandel]

imc-tech meeting 8-21-02

present: paul r., clint, dan l., brian, mike l., sascha

Clint ordered a new motherboard for the public access computer in the front
room -- a PII-400 w/ 196 MB RAM installed.  It will be a step up, and it
is a donation from Clint.  thanks Clint!


Our website SPAMMER is still visiting us, has tried some new tactics
including
changing web proxy and varying its material somewhat.  we will remain in 
auto-hide mode for the moment in order to stave off another flood.
Dan has analyzed our incoming traffic and will set up a script that will
auto-unhide known good local web hosts (like soltec, uiuc, etc.) and leave
others hidden for manual unhiding per our current approach.

Clint fixed the DADA features bug mentioned last week and is on track to
have
Dada ready to go in a week.  Some html needs to be cleaned up and links
to our internal sites (print, policies, etc) need to be put up.  Dan
volunteers
to do this since he likes to pick through html.

Clint thinks it will be relatively easy to port our existing story database
to Dada, leaving aside hidden stories (75% of which are SPAM). 

Dada has the ability to allow website visitors to vote on stories to become
features, in addition to a set of editors who can make features.  To start
we'll leave visitor voting off, so that functionality is like the current
site.  Paul proposes having a series of caucuses to determine how the
new Dada site will operate -- hopes we'll have a collective or working
group of editors who will write and do features for the site.

Existing multimedia uploads pose some problem -- they don't port well
to the Dada database structures.  Zach suggested that we keep the old'
Active site up to handle these and just route this traffic to active,
but turn off posting so that the Dada site is our main one.  Everyone
thinks this is a good idea.

Paul says that Madison is getting their own server and is considering
dumping Active for sf-Active which is a fork of Active.  Paul suggested
Dada to them, and suggested that they wait to see how our transition
goes.

Brian's halfway done with assembling the camcorder kit bag.  

That's it.