In 2002, I grew annoyed with not finding the obscure technical information I was looking for, so I started #Gmane, the #mailing_list_archive. All technical discussion took place on mailing lists those days, and archiving those were, at best, spotty and with horrible web interfaces.
The past few weeks, the Gmane machines (and more importantly, the company I work for, who are graciously hosting the servers) have been the target of a number of distributed denial of service attacks. Our upstream have been good about helping us filter out the DDoS traffic, but it’s meant serious downtime where we’ve been completely off the Internet.
Of course, there are ways to try to mitigate all this: I’m moving the Gmane servers off of my employer’s net, and I’m putting Cloudflare in front of the Gmane web servers.
But I ask myself: Is this fun any more?
I’m thinking about ending Gmane, at least as a web site. Perhaps continue running the SMTP-to-NNTP bridge? Perhaps not? I don’t want to make 20-30K mailing lists start having bouncing addresses, but I could just funnel all incoming mail to /dev/null, I guess…
I’m open to ideas here. If somebody else wants to take over the concept, I can FedEx you a disk containing the archive (as an NNTP spool). I’ve written a lot of software for Gmane, but it’s all quite site specific and un-documented. And the web interface was written in, like, 2004, so it’s way way way un-Web 2.0-ey and shiny. You’re probably better off implementing this stuff from scratch.
▻https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane
/me sad...
