[Lnc-business] Request for Update on LP.org
Kevin Ludlow
ludlow at gmail.com
Thu Nov 3 23:30:40 EDT 2016
Starchild,
You're welcome.
I can understand from a technical perspective why you would classify most
> of these items as "design" issues rather than "bugs", but to my mind from a
> lay perspective they are all issues that resulted from the overhaul and
> that is what matters here.
>
I understand. But please do understand that I'm working hard to fix bugs.
Last week I received a rather hateful email that there were tons of bugs
(not from you). I spent time searching for these bugs only to later
discover the point was on non-ported pages. While I understand it may be
the same, I'm just asking for consideration of the jargon so we can all be
on the same page.
> I don't consider it acceptable for staff or others to make major
> substantive changes like removing the "Party of Principle" slogan under
> cover of a website redesign without our prior approval.
>
I am certain I can't sway your opinion, but since I realize you're a large
supporter of process... The effort to re-brand / re-market / re-build the
site was voted on by the LNC earlier this year. Mr. Moulton made great
reference to it in his email to us all. Whether you agree with those
changes or not is certainly your opinion, but there was indeed a process
for this and it was executed.
> Members of the LNC should also be the deciders when it comes to which
> photo of themselves they want displayed, and if anyone on staff has an
> issue with a member's choice, that concern should be brought forward to us
> as a body *after* following the member's wishes.
>
Again, I'm not suggesting otherwise, but there are certain basic guidelines
that need to be met in order to keep the appearance of the site to a
standard. If there is really a stubbornness or an outright rejection to
the idea that in order for a website to maintain its appearance a photo has
to be of a certain quality, I can only BEG the other members of this board
that they vote upon this and make it enforceable. Such has been debated in
the past and rejected on the idea that people could simply understand why
this is important to the consistency of the site. It would be highly
unfortunate to me to think that a rule would need to be put in place for
people to comprehend this idea. Again, if your preferred picture is that
of a nevernude (Arrested Development, anyone?), then by all means. I'm
merely suggesting it has to be a high-quality photo that fits a certain
technical spec and is of you alone.
> If you say the listing of email addresses in plain text attracting spam is
> no longer a significant issue, I'll take your word on that since it's not
> something I know much about.
>
They should be fine.
>
> But assuming it eventually works out to general satisfaction, having
> played a major role in redesigning the website of the country's 3rd largest
> political party will be a nice feather you can stick in your professional
> web designer cap, poor timing issues aside, and that should help compensate
> for the work being unpaid.
>
I appreciate the sentiment. I don't usually worry about such feathers any
longer, but more importantly to that piece: if the site is not properly
maintained, it will quickly fall into the same level of disarray it once
had. I am outlining this in detail in my report.
> Of course we can't and shouldn't *require* anyone to donate their time
> for this or anything else, but I do think it ought to be our general policy
> to seek volunteers before paying to have work done, whether the work in
> question relates to IT or something else.
>
I simply cannot disagree with you more strongly here.
YES, there are some lower-level tasks that we can get volunteers to
manage. No doubt about this. Editing photos. Writing blog entries.
Things of this nature. But to suggest that a volunteer can simply step
into the backend and maintain our server pool, the variety of EC2 instances
powering it, the complex DNS arrangement we have, the S3 and Cloudfront
distributed file systems we have, and the consistency of the server images
themselves, is, with all due respect sir, an absurdity beyond absurdities.
It is quite honestly like asking a volunteer to step into a courtroom to
defend us against a massive suit.
We charge hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to accomplish this kind
of work. When in fact you get a volunteer to do this kind of work because
after all, they've tinkered in some networking before, you are almost
guaranteed to destroy the integrity of the infrastructure as it simply
requires a particular skillset to do it right. We need to pay people
solely on the basis that we can find a person with that very specific
skillset.
At an absolute minimum, the person maintaining our infrastructure must be a
LAMP-stack developer with extensive Linux administration knowledge, a PHP
and MySQL background, with full knowledge of Apache. Additionally the
person must be intimately familiar with AWS EC2, S3, Cloudfront, EFS, ELB,
and all AWS Route 53 DNS configurators. The must fully understand the RDS
system and have considerable knowledge of the DR (disaster recovery)
mechanisms we have in place to ensure 100% availability. Additional
automation experience through Pipeline, Jenkins, or things of this nature
would be highly desirable too.
I realize it seems like I just tossed out 20 acronyms, but those are
exactly the technologies required just to maintain what I've configured
this past month alone and that doesn't even touch the mail server or get
into the Rackspace configuration or the actual WP backend. Just because
somebody knows how to program in Javascript (for example) doesn't mean they
have the skills required to maintain this kind of infrastructure. We're
following very standard, but very high-level best practices for a
high-availability environment with built-in disaster recovery options (aka:
near immediate bounceback from a crash or hack). These are not services we
have even considered in the past, much less had in place and they've left
us very vulnerable to attack.
We cannot simply find a volunteer to do that kind of work and I again BEG -
BEG this organization not to treat the technology component like it's a
kid's game. If this work were easy or meant for college kids in their
spare time, I wouldn't be able to charge what I do. We're all supposed to
be market capitalists here. Please understand WHY the market charges what
it does for this kind of work.
/rant
When we simply rush into spending money without first exploring volunteer
> possibilities, we are not acting as responsible custodians of party funds.
>
In regards to technology, I have exactly the opposite opinion. BECAUSE we
didn't use professionals, we have wasted many tens of thousands of dollars
in needless architecture, over-priced servers, and time wasted fixing what
could have been done right the first time. I cannot begin to tell you ow
much time I had to spend fixing components that were improperly
configured. Starting from the ground up would have been much easier than
maintaining the metaphorical rat-nest we have inadvertently created over
the years. Please do keep this in mind.
Low-level system-administration and development of a highly-trafficked web
architecture is NOT a voluntary job. It's very specific and very demanding.
-Kevin
> Love & Liberty,
> ((( starchild )))
> At-Large Representative, Libertarian National Committee
> (415) 625-FREE
> @StarchildSF
>
>
> On Nov 3, 2016, at 6:40 PM, Kevin Ludlow wrote:
>
> Starchild,
>
> I did want to try and tackle your bullet points one by one here, just so
> you get a response from me on if / how they're being fixed.
>
>>
>> *• While the site looks good on the web, it looks terrible on my phone!
>> The "Latest News" boxes show up as long, narrow, unreadable columns of type
>> with a couple letters on each line. Considering how many people access
>> websites on mobile devices, fixing this should be a high priority.*
>>
>> Again, this should be resolved. Let me know if cache clearing fixed it.
> If not we may have to look into a specific Android fix for the responsive
> theme, but this will be a low priority right now given the very low Android
> traffic.
>
>>
>> • I don't see either the "Party of Principle" or "Minimum Government,
>> Maximum Freedom" slogans shown anywhere (a search for key terms doesn't
>> turn them up). Nor do I see the Nolan Chart except buried in a link. Each
>> of these ought to be listed prominently, imho. The brief introduction
>> statement when you click on "Libertarian Party" at the top of the main page
>> is rather weak ("The Libertarian Party (LP) is your representative in
>> American politics. We are the only political organization which respects
>> you as a unique and responsible individual.")
>>
>> Currently a design consideration, not a bug.
>
>>
>> • The more detailed description of the party has a conservative leaning.
>> Under "The Libertarian Option" (at http://libparty.zocalodesi
>> gn.com/about/ , a URL that like that of many pages should also be fixed
>> so that it doesn't include the web design company's website), it reads:
>>
>> Consider voting Libertarian or joining the Libertarian Party because…
>>
>> - We seek to substantially reduce the size and intrusiveness of
>> government and cut and eliminate taxes at every opportunity.
>> - We believe that peaceful, honest people should be able to offer
>> their goods and services to willing consumers without inappropriate
>> interference from government.
>> - We believe that peaceful, honest people should decide for
>> themselves how to live their lives, without fear of criminal or civil
>> penalties.
>> - We believe that government’s only responsibility, if any, should be
>> protecting people from force and fraud.
>>
>> The first two points above appeal more to conservatives or people on the
>> right (economic freedoms), while the second two points are more neutral in
>> terms of left/right appeal. There is no balancing appeal to people on the
>> left by explicitly mentioning things like a non-interventionist foreign
>> policy or civil liberties such as ending Prohibition and reining in police
>> abuse.
>>
>> Again, textual consideration, not a bug. Staff can choose to reword or
> not.
>
>>
>> • The URL for the candidate page has changed (hat tip to Thomas Knapp),
>> and entering the former URL (http://www.lp.org/2016-libert
>> arian-party-candidates) apparently now results in a page error rather
>> than connecting people to the new page (https://www.lp.org/2016-candi
>> dates/).
>>
>> Yes. There were several pages that had their slugs updated. This was
> one of them. We have a tool for staff to set the auto-redirects. This one
> has already been done. I've noted to the LNC several times now that if
> others are found, please email us with them and we'll update the permanent
> redirection.
>
>>
>> • If the information about how to subscribe to the LNC email list as a
>> non-LNC member got ported over, I cannot find it. I would suggest listing
>> this both on the LNC leadership page, and on the LNC meeting archives page.
>>
>> This is an organizational design consideration, not a bug. We can let
> staff mull it over.
>
>>
>> • The LNC page only lists email addresses. Previously at least a couple
>> LNC members' listings included phone number and/or other info such as
>> Twitter address, but now those listings are gone and only email addresses
>> are listed. I would personally like my phone number and Twitter handle
>> listed, and encourage my colleagues to request their phone numbers likewise
>> be listed, so that our members can readily reach us directly as well as in
>> writing.
>>
>> Right now this is a design consideration of trying to standardize
> information available. I do personally believe there should be consistency
> in the approach and more importantly, there is a need for consistency as
> variation is difficult to maintain -- perhaps not so much in this case, but
> as a general idea for web design. Again though, something for staff to
> mull over as it's not a bug.
>
>>
>> • Where email addresses are listed on the website (for candidates, LNC
>> members, staff, college chapter reps., etc.), they are spelled out. That's
>> unfortunately asking to get us spammed by web-crawling bots that harvest
>> email addresses. I recommend changing this so that addresses are listed in
>> a less literal format such as Nick.Sarwark[at]LP.org
>>
>> I totally understand the sentiment of this, but to be honest, it's kindof
> an outdated concern. SPAM filters are generally so effective these days
> that harvesting at this level is not that common and you'll find that most
> major organizations display their email addresses in plain text on
> purpose. I could find dozens of examples, but here is the Wall Street
> Journal - certainly a prominent and highly trafficked site:
> https://customercenter.wsj.com/public/view/contactinformation.html
>
>>
>> • The page https://www.lp.org/_2016/ mentions Johnson and Weld being our
>> presidential and VP candidates, but the photo next to the text is *not* a
>> photo of Johnson and Weld, but of Johnson and a woman I'm guessing is his
>> girlfriend (which is fine, but should be labeled as such so as not to give
>> visitors the impression that the images reflect the text).
>>
>> I can see this one going either way. I don't think it's confusing that
> the text not match identically what the image is. Still though, it's a
> design consideration - albeit perhaps one that staff should consider
> revising.
>
>>
>> • Our bylaws are referred to in the info at the bottom of each page as
>> "LNC Bylaws" rather than "Libertarian Party Bylaws"
>>
>> A textual fix that will need to happen with staff, but good catch.
>
>>
>> • A number of people (staff, LNC members) are missing photos. To whom can
>> we send photos of these individuals, if we have them, as well as our
>> contact info updates for the LNC page?
>>
>> Photos can and should be sent to staff. I saw there was a fund for LNC
> members to get professional shots? I would advise this be done. Photos
> submitted will need to be of a certain quality (I'm not defining content,
> but rather photo quality) in order to be displayed. Pictures containing
> other people, random exterior backgrounds, too far away, blurry,
> low-resolution, etc. will not be inserted onto the site for the sake of
> quality control.
>
> Hopefully this helps a little bit.
>
> ~k
>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Lnc-business mailing list
>> Lnc-business at hq.lp.org
>> http://hq.lp.org/mailman/listinfo/lnc-business_hq.lp.org
>
>
--
========================================================
Kevin Ludlow
512-773-3968
http://www.kevinludlow.com
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