Stewards' noticeboard

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Donation Drive Notice
Just leaving a notice that I received 3 of the exact same message postings from the "mass messaging system" on my profile at the same time. Kinda of an annoying way to blow up my profile messages.

Anthonyk747 (talk) 15:46, 5 January 2015 (GMT)
 * Hi Anthony - I'm really sorry about that. I went through and removed all of the duplicates. It was my first time using the extension and none of the messages seemed to go out. I then noticed a typo in the Indiegogo link and had to fix that. Again, my apologies for the newbie mistake :) D u s t i *Let's talk!* 15:49, 5 January 2015 (GMT)

Organizational Structure Change
It's with great sadness that I announce that John Lewis has decided to part ways with Orain. At this time, Tanner, Zachary_DuBois, and Tim will be joining our SysAdmin team. Each of them are identified according to our Privacy Policy, however, they will not have access to the Steward permissions unless they go through a community granted permissions process. D u s t i *Let's talk!* 03:29, 20 January 2015 (GMT)

A message from one of the founders
The last couple of days have been, well, insane. Personally, I've had some issues to take care of and haven't been around as much as needed. Professionally, Orain has gone through a vast amount of changes that have gone unannounced. This is due, in part, because of my negligence, and I apologize for that. At no time have I intended to keep the community "in the dark" over what's been going on. The first order of business is a staffing change. John Lewis is no longer with Orain. This is due for several reasons and I'm not going to dive into those in an attempt to keep this community drama free and out of respect for John. He and I spoke and it was determined the best course of action was for Orain and he to part ways. I cannot thank him enough for his hard work, dedication, and the commitment that he's shown this project. With that being said, the obvious issue at hand, and the reason that we've had an Indiegogo campaign, is because we have technical resource needs. We've outgrown our current home and things were happening that aren't fair to the end user - you. While John was looking towards us purchasing our own servers to help with long term stability, several neutral parties expressed their concerns over the cons of that thought. When looking at the long term pro's and con's of the idea, the con's, while few, outweigh the benefits. I approached several individuals that I have worked with in the past at other wiki farms and they were enthusiastic about helping Orain. They quickly came to our think tank and had excellent ideas. They have the passion, enthusiasm, and skills that Orain needs to continue strong as we prepare for some changes to our community. After the departure of John, I did not hesitate trusting these individuals. These individuals had no problem identifying to our community as per our identification procedures and have been given root access. They do not, however, have steward rights. Those rights are community trust positions and granted by the community. Each of them have agreed to abide by the Privacy policy set in place to protect our users and the community as a whole. I am confident that with these individuals, plus our two standing sysadmins Geth and Southparkfan, in addition to the co-founder of this project Kudu we will not only continue to better our project and our community, but we'll be able to quickly implement and respond to Feature requests and wiki requests in a timely manner. I've asked one of the users, Tanner (git on IRC) to prepare a statement that I'll now share with you. I want to reiterate and assure you that Orain is going to remain heading in the direction that it was already heading. The only major change that we're currently looking at is our servers, which was the purpose of the Indiegogo campaign. Here is git's statement:
 * Hi, I'm Tanner. As I'm sure you know, Orain has been having some technical problems. Dusti reached out to me a few days ago asking if I could help solve these problems. I investigated them a bit, and saw a few problems. First, the current infrastructure is not suited for our number of users. I plan on fixing this by shifting some things around on the servers, and adding/removing servers as necessary. In addition, I would like to move some of our services off of Orain-owned servers, onto "as a service"s. These might include Route 53 (a DNS service provided by Amazon), SES (an outgoing email service provided by Amazon), and Mailstache, Zoho, or Google Apps (all services to recieve emails). I would also like to move from using Nagios to monitor our servers to a service such as New Relic and Pingdom. By doing this, we will ensure that, should an entire datacenter go down, we will be notified no matter what. In addition, we, as a team of system administrators, are considering moving our servers from DigitalOcean to Amazon Web Services, also known as AWS. AWS is used by some of the largest websites on the internet, including Netflix, Reddit, NASA. By using AWS, we would more easily be able to scale our services as needed, and reduce downtime.

Some users have expressed a concern about our funds and a staff change while undergoing a donation drive. I want to reiterate that I am the only individual that has access to Orain's funds. No other user has access to our funds. These funds are held in our PayPal account and a savings account held by the Bank of Nova Scotia. The funds are linked (i.e. PayPal is linked to the Savings account) so funds can be transferred back and forth and not held in a single location for security reasons. A minimal amount (i.e. two months of bills) are held in the PayPal account at a time. This is due to PayPal's ability to freeze funds without cause and for security reasons. Kudu and I are in the process of submitting paperwork to the Government of Canada to obtain a non-profit classification for Orain which will enable us to have a completely separate bank account to hold our funds in. Finally, over the coming days and weeks, proposals will be made to the community regarding policy updates. These are usually done yearly by organizations such as Facebook, PayPal, etc. and are meant to increase the level of security and privacy the members of the community have and should expect. These policies will only be strengthened, not weakened. I am excited over these changes and feel that Orain is going to continue to head in a positive fashion and that the changes we are beginning to experience will better our services, strengthen our community, and help us move forward united as one. Warm regards, Dustin Muniz D u s <font color="#0000ff">t <font color="#6600cc">i *Let's talk!* 00:30, 22 January 2015 (GMT)