I'm not intending to come across as completely ungratefully but to say I'm not happy would be an understatement. Tune out if you have no interest in rants.
I, and I know for certain I wasn't the only one at the time, assumed on first-impressions that ALUG was inactive after moving to East Anglia on the basis that the original website in place was hideously out of date and riddled with spam.
Several years on, in 2007, I chose to get involved with a LUG and on closer inspection unearthed the community around the ALUG mailing list, and IRC. With a desire to set up an Ipswich LUG, I invited several others I thought might be interested to join this mailing list and then I started a discussion which essentially boiled down to me being quite happy not to be a "splitter" by creating an Ipswich LUG, if we could come to some arrangement about being able to access the website and such. Despite me offering to travel to Norwich to meet any of the current website maintainers or on IRC, I heard nothing. I also offered to effectively setup a completely new infrastructure, if someone could provide me with SFTP access and a database but it was made perfectly clear that - presumably as the new guy - I couldn't possibly be provided with such access. Despite us being able to claim free hosting from lug.org.uk, it was quite clear that the general feeling on the list was that we should try to make use of the existing resources rather than start afresh. This effectively, meant using a web server which, as far as I could tell, was controlled by some old ALUG boys' network with some hosting provider that some member had / or had once worked at. Despite being as polite and patient as possible, the discussion went round and round in circles for ages - noone would consider allowing us access to the site, yet did not want to spend any time on the existing site themselves.
Eventually, presumably to shut me up, MoinMoin was unpacked alongside the old site. Was I happy? Not particularly. It looks dreadful out of the box, the product and syntax wasn't familiar to me (or anyone else I knew) in the slightest and, of course, we were still in the position that we had no access to the server so couldn't keep the underlying site up to date, perform backups of our own or install any other apps that might be of use. But I naively thought this was what a community was about. I was assured the site was being maintained by great guys. I was the new kid, so I endeavoured to keep the majority happy by not splitting even only at the website level and tried to make the best use out of MoinMoin as I could. I spent hours moving and updating content from the original site to the new wiki, I put up with a torrent of people complaining about how bad it looked even though I had no access to change the terrible default theme myself - I sent several suggestions of alternative themes to those with access, none of which were ever investigated as far as I'm aware.
However, I and others plugged away at it and after a lot of man-hours, I think finally got it to a point where at least it looked in-use and up-to-date albeit still a bit ugly. Most of the complaints on the list died down, and eventually the new wiki replaced the old site. For the next three years, I kept our comprehensive meet details complete and up-to-date and also regularly contributed meeting reports every month - not only to record a history of what we've been up to for the benefit of ppl who can't make the meetings, but also to show visitors to the site that we are an active group.
And, now, it's just dropped on to the list that actually this "arrangement" hasn't worked out and we have, in fact, lost it all? There are no backups and we're at a mercy of a hosting provider who presumably has no ties back to this group, and I assume has never received any money from anyone for the services they've been providing thus far.
From what little information that has been allowed to trickle down to
me, I don't think the hosting providers can be blamed much here at all.
I will cross my fingers that someone from the hosting provider will eventually respond and the missing data is recovered but if it is permanently gone, I'm afraid there isn't a chance I personally am putting any effort whatsoever into another blank ALUG MoinMoin site that once again runs at the whim of someone else I only barely know, who provides no guaranteed level of support. I think it'd be a(nother) waste of my time to contribute.
For those who turn up to the next Ipswich meet we can discuss whether to make do with the blank site (maybe someone else will offer to fill in some Ipswich meet details for us and we'll leave it at that) or whether we want to set up a new site ourselves - one which /isn't/ restricted to an elite few, is reliably backed up and provided with some basic level of support. Such hosting is available for free to groups such as this and has been for a very long time. Not that I particularly want to split from ALUG, but the latter option of course may bring up the question of whether having a separate site would also lead us towards choosing our own domain name.
Rant over - and I'm not casting aspersions on the reliability of Noodles' server. If the ALUG site is required to start again from scratch there, I truly wish best of luck to anyone willing to contribute their time re-building it. It's no secret that I have always considered the website an important first point of contact for potential new members.
Cheers,
Peter.