Fall cleaning

One of the problems with an ever growing, ever evolving project like KDE is that we leave a lot of crumbs all over the internet from started and aborted projects. These take the form of websites, mailing lists, svn subdirectories, wiki entries, etc. which may have little or no relevance to the current project. Some of these are indeed, very old, but still provide misdirection to users (and developers) who are looking for more relevant information. We promo people are often to blame for some of this due to overzealous content creation without thinking about the administration and upkeep that is required down the road.

Now along comes a new face on the kde-promo list (Hi Justin!) who is the type of person who cares less about talking about doing things, and cares more about doing things. A few months back, he asks "What can I do to help?", and we all sort-of half-respond with a list of useful junior jobs, which we usually do to a newcomer, and which usually scares most people away. Well, surprisingly, he actually started to do these things, which is a huge plus.

In the next few days, if you get an email from Justin about abandoned or disused mailing lists, that is just him helping the sysadmin team to clear up some old cruft. In a few weeks, we'll be submitting to them a list of mailing lists that can be nuked based on inactivity (6 months or higher without a single non-spam message), moderator responses (no, this list is still needed/yes, nuke it/no moderator response after a while), and common sense (eg: campkde only happens once a year, but the list gets reused. Inactivity during the rest of the year does not mean the list is dead).

So, as luck would have it, I have a few days free, and rather than falling into my usual routine (reading slashdot, arguing with people on irc about stories I read on slashdot, etc...), I figured I'd take a quick look at the current status of the KDE websites. Now I know that the high-traffic websites are usually in good shape since they are, well, high traffic, but it is the often forgotten side-websites that are left to gather cobwebs after an age of neglect. A good place to start for such as task is kde.org/family, which can point people to all sort of dead, underused, outdated, or plainly incorrect websites with information about KDE. A lot of this content could/should be migrated to techbase or userbase where administration becomes easier. Some should just be nuked altogether.

I know that website cleaning is a thankless job, and one that can never be completed, but I'll give it my best try. I might need to enlist some help in migrating/updating a few pages, but if people like Justin, who are new to contributing to KDE, are willing to lend a hand, then we just might pull it off.

Anyone new to KDE looking for a way to help, please email kde-promo@kde.org and we'll get you connected.