By dries on

Just wanted to let you all know that we split the infrastructure mailing list into two parts: a mailing list for Drupal.org webmasters, and a mailing list for Drupal.org server administrators. This separation should allow us to better coordinate the maintenance and development of the various Drupal.org websites.

The "Drupal.org webmasters" are responsible for the organization of the websites, the Drupal.org brand, blocking spam, dealing with user account problems and so on. The "Drupal.org server administrators" on the other hand, fiddle with the Apache and MySQL configurations, the mail server, the CVS repositories, and will take on the task of upgrading the various Drupal.org websites.

In addition to a dedicated mailing list, each group also got a dedicated issue tracker: issues for webmasters and issues for server administrators. If you bump into a problem related to the Drupal.org websites, try to select the correct project.

And last but not least, we're actively looking for more people to get involved with the day-to-day maintenance of all our infrastructure and the continued development of new bells and whistles. As you might have read, Drupal grew by more than 230% in 2006, and hopefully we'll be able to welcome many new users throughout 2007. This continued growth requires us not only to streamline our workflow, but also to get more people on board to help.

For 2007, it looks like our server administrators will have to invest heavily in (i) tuning our setup, (ii) optimizing Drupal and/or (iii) adding more hardware to our setup. I'd also like to figure out with the webmasters what changes we have to make to improve the Drupal.org experience. So if you want to help, a good start would be to subscribe to the proper mailing list and to work that issue queue. Should be fun and interesting!

Comments

sime’s picture

sime
any/any
Location Melbourne
commented

I'm finding it easier to get the roles and responsibilities clear in my head.

comperr’s picture

comperr commented

What would I do if I wanted to join and help out?

dww’s picture

dww
we/he/they
commented

here's what you can do to help:

  1. join the webmasters mailing list as described in the post.
  2. keep an eye on the issue queue(s) mentioned in the post.
  3. see if you can verify/reproduce reported problems (both on drupal.org and on a local test site, if possible). follow-up in the issue queue to report your findings, give details of your testing configuration, browser, etc.
  4. watch out for duplicate issues (people submit them all the time), and mark the newer one as status "duplicate" with a link to the older issue as the body of your reply.
  5. go through the backlog of old issues in the webmasters issue queue and try to clean up the old issues: mark them as closed if they're no longer relevant, change the title or otherwise update their status if they're still valid, try to track down unanswered questions that might be blocking progress, etc.
  6. monitor new forum posts. if they're talking about the drupal.org website or infrastructure itself, either point people to existing issues, or submit a concise issue that describes the bug/feature clearly (or encourage/help the user to do so themselves).

that'd be a huge start right there. depending on how that all goes, someone might eventually decide to give you more permissions on drupal.org to help out with the administrative tasks themselves. however, those tasks take up a small subset of the time spent on this stuff, so the above items would be just as (if not more) valuable.

thanks!
-derek

___________________
3281d Consulting

comperr’s picture

comperr commented

thanx -
will start

yahmaster’s picture

yahmaster commented

Yes, me to.
I ve got some spare time right now so why not.

Yahmaster

odozgara’s picture

odozgara commented

Well I see it all went all right. At least thats what I figure since I see noone complaining. Anyway you've helped me a lot, thank you.