Changes to EthMagicians over the past few days
This forum has always been community-managed infra. Following this weekend’s outage, the Ethereum Foundation offered the support of its DevOps team by bringing EthMag into its broader Discourse infrastructure. Day-to-day administration by the existing admins and community remains the same, but the EF DevOps team now helps behind the scenes with hosting, backups, and performance monitoring.
What’s been added: daily offsite backups, system monitoring, and a dedicated maintenance window every Saturday morning CET. Infrastructure changes will only happen during that time unless otherwise coordinated. In that vein, all parties involved are aware that the forum is slow or intermittently unreachable right now and the forum will be taken offline between Apr 3, 5:30-7am UTC (~8 hours after this is being posted) to optimize performance.
During the outage last weekend, it wasn’t totally clear to either observers or active participants on the forum who the point of contact is, who the admins are, which of those are active, and where the best venue for EthMagicians news is when the site is down.
Proposal
I have a few proposals for EthMagicians going forward. The gist of it is:
- Transparency in administration and moderation
a. Designate a specific person to explore new Discourse features / formats for UX improvements - Resilience in access to the @EthMagicians Twitter account
- Use of the Twitter delegation feature to make the account more active
- Transparency of those delegates
Transparency in administration and moderation
I think we should have a public list of EthMagicians administrators & moderators and clarity in their roles. This makes it easier to reach out to people when e.g. tags are missing from posts, posts are duplicated, someone has questions, or someone has suggestions on how to update the Discourse configuration to fully utilize any new, desired features. Ideally, the admin or moderators on the forum are active members of the community, regardless of affiliation. I don’t know who all is currently a moderator or how many there are. I find it easier as a newcomer to any space to orient myself, become an active contributor, and develop agency when the system’s structure is clear.
(1a.) Related, but worth a separate discussion to follow - it would be nice to explore new Discourse features to make the UX even better. This can be done by existing admin (ideally someone specific), a new admin, or a public RFP.
Resilience in access to the @EthMagicians Twitter account
The Twitter account should have a minimum of two people with emergency admin access to the account - It seems prudent that one of these parties be the DevOps team that’s maintaining the infrastructure going forward - they have processes for securely holding and protecting login info and are an appropriate party to do so. If we secure this account operationally, we can reliably use it for communication about Ethereum Magicians when the forum itself can’t be reached and be reasonably certain we won’t lose access to it due to human error.
Use of the delegation feature to make the @EthMagicians twitter account more active
Before the outage this last weekend, the Twitter account had 0 posts in the past year. I think posts can reach a much wider audience if we have a bridge between the forum and Crypto Twitter to let people know what’s going on in the forum. Twitter has a feature where you can safely designate accounts to post on @EthMagicians’s behalf without introducing much security risk - this permission can be revoked at any point by those with admin access to the account. These delegates should have requirements on their personal Twitter accounts:
- No phone number attached to the account (this has been shown to be a security vulnerability by being a vector to bypass 2FA on Twitter)
- 2FA with a hardware key or authentication app
- Yearly password rotation
Transparency of those delegates
Knowing who these delegates are means that the community can offer post suggestions to these individuals, keep them accountable, and generally have an idea of who’s active and who should be removed for decreased interest / participation. It would be optimal to keep the number of delegates small to reduce security risks, but the ones we do have should be active.
Summary
The Fellowship of Ethereum Magicians forum is a core part of public Ethereum discussion — I’m glad to see that it’s transitioning to having a more resilient foundation and I think we can also transition its community-governed features to a transparent structure that’ll help keep it active and evolving in the future.
