[Imc-uk-process] Clearing out the dead wood

[ben]

Hi all,

I've been trying to initiate a proposal at the global level to purge the
dead sites out of the IMC list that appears on every indymedia site.

Below is a list of 23 sites which simply do not exist at all at the time
of writing and there are many others which are broken, hacked or closed.

http://nigeria.indymedia.org/
http://montreal.indymedia.org/
http://burma.indymedia.org/
http://india.indymedia.org/
http://armenia.indymedia.org/
http://darwin.indymedia.org/
http://brisbane.indymedia.org/
http://croatia.indymedia.org/
http://belgrade.indymedia.org/
http://winnipeg.indymedia.org
http://belgrade.indymedia.org
http://chilesur.indymedia.org
http://bigmuddyimc.org/
http://idaho.indymedia.org/
http://ithaca.indymedia.org/
http://madison.indymedia.org/
http://www.ntimc.org/
http://tallahassee.indymedia.org/
http://tampabay.indymedia.org
http://vermont.indymedia.org/
http://wvl.indymedia.org/
http://biotech.indymedia.org/
http://process.indymedia.org/faq.php3 (long gone)

It is possible that some of these are having temporary problems and will
return but a lot of them have been gone for a long long time.

There also are others which may be dead or may just be having technical
issues...

detriot.org/ - hacked?
mumbai.indymedia.org/ - hacked?
tnimc.org/ - forbidden due to permissions problem, is there a site?

Additionally there are one's we know are having technical difficulties and
know will be back...

radio.indymedia.org - server problems but coming back
kenya.indymedia.org - off but apparently coming back really soon

There are also 'frozen' projects which still have websites or holding
pages and it can be assumed that some of those will come back at some
point.

www.stlimc.org - no editorial features, collective reorganizing
hamilton.indymedia.org - closed to publishing but perhaps to return
melbourne.indymedia.org - publishing suspended, but perhaps to return
bc.indymedia.org - off for now, may relaunch
victoria.indymedia.org - off for now, may relaunch
beirut.indymedia.org - collective dissolved a few months ago

There are almost certainly others which are working sites but with no
active collective anymore - I've certainly spotted a few where the vast
majority of posts are commercial spam or porn but I have no idea what can
be done in these situations.

Like in the UK network with the issue of West Country indymedia, there
appears to be no gloabl process in place to deal with dead sites or non
existing collectives.

It took several years in the UK to finally turn off Westcountry even
though there had been no collective for over three years and a closing
note had been placed on the site. It seems that a proposal to global
process will fair no better. Therefore I would like to propose that the UK
takes a unilateral approach with a view to pushing forward discussion and
eventual action at the global level.

My proposal is therefore that the UK site make use of a non standard
modified cities.inc list rather than the out-of-date list generated by the
IMC contacts database.

This new list could be manual generated or it could use the generic auto
generated cities.inc list but automatically filter out bad links based on
link validation tests. Better still would be an even smarter approach that
would take into consideration when a dead link was last seen working and
leave it in the list if it was up a few days before.

The smart approach would result in a list that still contained links to
sites undergoing short term technical difficulties and it would also
automatically reintroduce sites which were relaunched after long periods
of downtime. Obviously the automatic approach could not deal with sites
which have been closed but leave some kind of holding page but I don't
think this is so much of an issue.

Why do I think this is important and worth bothering with? I think it
gives a really bad impression that so much of the global network consists
of dead links and that it does us no favors to hang onto the idea that
there are 180  plus indymedia sites when there are not. More sites will go
- only last week melborne indymedia closed down. If Indymedia is
contracting, surely it is better that we don't hide from the fact till
half the network is gone. Clearing out the dead wood in the cities.inc
list is a way of coming to terms with the shrinking of the indymedia
network and hopefully laying the ground work for a healthier future.

I really feel that beyond the simple issue of whether to list dead
websites in the cities list, the issue of removing dead IMC collectives
from the IMC network is one that must be dealt with on a global level. It
appears there needs to be an dead-IMC process just like there is a new-IMC
process. Not dealing with this now as the network contracts is just
leaving us open for bigger problems in the future as more unmaintained
sites become spam holes and legal liabilities or get taken over by new
unaffiliated collectives and become political liabilities.

ben