Please chip in to help keep moderated newsgroups working [telecom]

***** Moderator's Note *****

I'm passing along a request from Jonathan Kamens that he sent to me as a Usenet moderator. Jonathan is one of the good guys: generous, selfless, and dedicated.

Please do what you can, and thanks.

Bill Horne Moderator

**************************

Subject: Please chip in (or ask your readers to) to help keep moderated newsgroups working Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2018 14:34:16 -0400 From: Jonathan Kamens To: Telecom Digest

Hi,

I've been maintaining one of the moderated newsgroup relay servers, i.e., the email servers that route moderated newsgroup postings to moderators, since 2010.

There used to be three relays, but one was having technical difficulties so it was removed from the rotation. Furthermore, the hosting infrastructure I was using has had reliability issues, so not infrequently we've been at only one active, working relay. In short, there isn't enough redundancy to ensure that there's a working relay all the time.

To improve things, I've moved the relay I maintain from its old infrastructure, which was free for me, to Linode, which costs money. I also want to set up a third relay on a different hosting provider (probably Vultr) in a different geographic location, for maximum redundancy.

I am happy to donate my time to this, but I would rather not also have to pay for it out-of-pocket, given that I'm paying school tuition for five children and I rarely even read any moderated newsgroups nowadays. Therefore, I've set up a Patreon page at

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, and I'm asking people to chip in to help pay for the relay servers I'm maintaining.

If you're willing to chip in $1 a month to help ensure that posters will continue to be able to get submissions reliably to your newsgroup, and/or you're willing to make a posting to your newsgroup asking readers to chip in, I'd appreciate it. I only need ~20 patrons to pledge $1 a month to provide enough funding to support two highly available and redundant relays.

I don't want to annoy people by asking too often, so once I have enough money banked to last for the next two years, I will disable the Patreon page and not ask again until the money runs out.

Please feel free to email me if you have any questions.

Again, the URL of the Patreon page is

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.

Thanks,

Jonathan Kamens

P.S. For /maximum/ redundancy, I'd actually prefer for someone else to maintain the third relay, rather than maintaining two myself. That way, there would be full redundancy in terms of maintainer as well as hosting provider and location. Setting up and maintaining a relay is pretty easy, since I can provide an Ansible playbook which completely builds out a relay from scratch. Of course if you don't have VM infrastructure to host on and end up paying for a VM like I am, I will share any donations I get with you to help cover the costs. Please get in touch with me if you are interested.

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Jonathan Kamens
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