State of EthMag: Sep 2025

For the previous April 2025 update, click here.


Infra-related changes

After outages earlier this year, management of backups, hosting, and performance monitoring was transferred to the Ethereum Foundation Devops team. The transition to a team whose job is to run these services means that we can be better equipped to quickly handle any issues. EthMag is a high point of coordination for research and implementation work on the Ethereum protocol, so it’s essential that its availability is reliable.

To this end, two Devops staff were added as admins: @ElasticRoentgen & @midnite. They will be responsible for keeping the forum online and software updated. Updates are regularly done during a maintenance window on Saturdays.

Transparency in moderation

Current admins

Current mods

Responsibilities

Admin responsibilities are mostly logistical - keeping the forum online, alerting any current issues, triaging emergencies, deleting spam, promoting user trust levels when new contributors can’t post, etc.

Mod responsibilities are more engaged with the day-to-day of the forum. This involves making sure that posts are correctly formatted, users are engaging in productive ways, and that call summaries are being correctly formatted

In addition, we have two category-specific moderators in the Web category:

EthMagicians Twitter account

The Ethereum Magicians twitter account has been more robustly secured with access to three EF folks: Nixo, Nico Consigny, & Tim Beiko. We’ve already begun to make the account somewhat more active, but would love to improve on it. Feel free to tag the account for RTs   : )

And a proposal: I think it would make sense to add one or more of the existing non-EF moderators here as a delegate to the twitter account.

Moving forward

The Protocol Support team is actively working on making the Ethereum upgrade process more transparent. We expect this category to stay active while we maintain and improve the protocolbot integrations and call summaries & discussions and EIP proposal discussions happen here.

We’d love for the other categories to similarly see active moderation and engagement. If you’re active in ERCs and want to be a category moderator, or have a proposal for a new category that you think could see good activity, please propose it! There’s plenty of room on this forum for more ownership of non-EIP, non-protocol-happenings type content.

2 Likes

@nixo

Protocol Calls

Now that forkcast.org has started adding calls, medium term do we need to also have call information on Eth Magicians?

Outstanding is supporting all call types and having a mechanism for call moderators to share action items & decisions. Ideally we would also have a place to link to third party writeups.

I wanted a single location to permanently store ACD (and other protocol call) summaries of actions/decisions. (AllCoreDevs, Network Upgrade & EthMagicians Process Improvements - #3 by abcoathup) and started an experiment to use Eth Magicians. I was manually creating a topic per protocol call, making them wiki posts, adding tags, adding links to recordings and summaries (and chasing call moderators for these). (After experimenting with sharing them on Mirror). Prior to that ACD summaries were in a mix of Eth R&D Discord and Twitter, with transcript artifacts stored in Ethereum/pm. @nicocsgy then started the automation process that @marcgarreau has continued.

As an aside, given @marcgarreau’s automation work, I think he should be made an admin.

EIP/ERC discussions

Do you see EIP/ERC discussions continuing to remain on Eth Magicians?
EIP/ERC process is ripe for some automation and “forkcasting” style magic.

Numbers should be issued automatically, discussions topic should be created automagically, AI summaries should be made available.

Long term future

Do we need a separate Eth Research & Eth Magicians Discourse forum?
Should Ethereum.org have a forum that includes this content?