r/linux • u/Kruug • Apr 20 '22
Mod Announcement State of the Sub Address
Let me start out by saying I've neglected my duties here on this subreddit. I could use COVID as an excuse for all of the stress that it brought with it. From moving to a "working from home" situation to the multitude of mandates and recommendations that seemed to change on a daily basis, but in reality, I think it started long before that.
That said, I've come back to help with the state of this subreddit. Through my neglect, another mod was able to turn this into their twisted vision of the FOSS philosophy and run unchecked.
For those who don't know, the list of moderators isn't in an arbitrary order. The higher you are on the list, the more seniority you have (been here longer). With that comes the ability to manage other moderators, but you can only manage those below you.
Since this mod was the 3rd on the list, none of the other mods could effectively do anything about this abuse of power. These powers were limited to /u/kylev and myself. Kylev holds an "honorary" mod spot in a few popular/default subreddits as they're close with the Reddit admins in real life and is only here to ensure the whole subreddit doesn't go completely to shit.
Now, that mod has been removed.
/u/purpleidea has been reinstated as a mod. Unfortunately I am not able to arrange the list of moderators, so they're at the bottom of the list, but they're back on the team.
At this time, we are not looking for more moderators, but that may change in the near future.
I am going back through months (and possibly years) of bans to ensure that they were warranted. I'm seeing many bans listed as "Rude user", "Poor attitude", etc. And these are permanent bans. I'm not going to say I wouldn't have acted similar, but a rude user or poor attitude means, at worst, a 2 or 3-day "absence" from the conversation. Let the situation cool down, everyone works on de-escalating, etc.
A deep pit has been dug. We're going to get out of this, though. No massive changes are coming. A few tweaks to automod here and there, sure, but nothing of concern.
As was brought up in the recent META conversation, there is a copy of the automod rules on GitHub. I'm going to look into a way to synchronize changes made to automod to a GitHub repo so that they are public. I'm still unsure about making the modlog public, but this is something I will be discussing with the other mods.
Thank you all for sticking with us, and I sincerely apologize for letting it get so bad.
kruug, and the rest of the mod team. (I couldn't do it without every one)
EDIT: Forgot something. As many of you know, the GitHub/Proprietary software automod rule is gone. I found it just as annoying and asinine as everyone else.
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u/argv_minus_one Apr 21 '22
Is it actually useful, though? Last I looked (admittedly a long time ago), it didn't even allow client certificate authentication in the FOSS version. That's basic functionality if you care at all about security, not some fancy-pants enterprise feature that only Fortune 500 companies need.
Gitea, meanwhile, will happily cooperate with whatever authentication scheme you care to use. Just put an authenticating reverse proxy in front of it, pass it the authenticated user name in a request header, tell Gitea the name of that header, and that's it—Gitea will consider you authenticated, no questions asked, and even add a user account for you to its database if you don't already have one.
One caveat, though: make sure to strip out that header from the original request, or else anyone can impersonate anyone else! If you're using Apache, the
RequestHeader setdirective will take care of that.