[Plone-conference] Why nuke the 2014 site?

Paul Roeland paul at cleanclothes.org
Wed Sep 16 19:54:53 UTC 2015


**note**
this is not in any way related to me being on the board, this is
strictly speaking as an overworked (and underpaid ;-) sysadmin
*******

The good thing about a flat mirror is that it's "set it and forget it".
Keeping possibly 10+ year sites up just for archival purposes has major
issues like "who is doing security upgrades", and conference sites will
also have integrations with for instance ticket sellers & payment
providers that may have gone out of business or changed their API
dramatically.

So, my plea would be for sensible solutions, but be very aware of the
ever-changing nature of the Web. Maintaining old sites over a lengthy
period of time is *not* free in terms of TLC. They quickly become an
attack vector.

So, my preference (again purely from sysadmin standpoint) is flat-mirror.

paul


On 16-09-15 21:48, Chris Calloway wrote:
> On 9/15/2015 4:33 PM, Laurence Rowe wrote:
>> Perhaps just making a flat mirror of the content once
>> the conference is over and the content no longer needs to be managed.
> 
> Just a couple of caveats. We've mirrored conference sites before. Two
> things occurred. One, you only get the public content. Things like
> internal documents where people worked on things like speaker
> selections, budgeting, volunteer scheduling, t-shirt and logo designs,
> etc.., were lost. Two, eventually the mirrors were lost. See how many
> Plone conference sites you can find.
> 
> Concerning Wayback Machine, much as I love it, take a look at:
> 
> https://web.archive.org/web/*/plone.org
> 
> We used to be able to see the complete history of Plone.org at Wayback
> machine (the early days were quite entertaining to see Plone emerging).
> But thanks to some robots.txt thuggery, we not only can't see that
> anymore, but about six to seven years of history have been lost in the
> interim when snapshots weren't being taken.
> 
> I think others have covered where Wayback Machine archives are pretty
> sketchy at best.
> 
> I think a content management community ought to be good at content
> management. It would at least give some insight into our tools. How easy
> is this conference content to manage throughout its lifecycle? Should be
> a snap, no? It would make a good talk at each conference: How We Saved
> and Made Available the Conference Content From Last Year: Lessons
> Learned and Ease of Use.
> 



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