Project administration

To reduce spam, the ipxe-devel mailing list is configured to hold mails sent by non-members for moderator approval.

The iPXE policy for moderator approvals is straightforward:

• Any obvious spam message should be discarded, with no further action taken. The sender should not be added to the auto-discard list.

• All other messages should be accepted. The sender should be added to the auto-accept list.

The goal is to eliminate all spam via the list, while minimising the burden of moderation.

A github user ipxe-devel is configured to receive github notifications at the address ipxe-devel@lists.ipxe.org, in order that github pull requests end up being forwarded to the ipxe-devel mailing list. The list is configured to automatically accept mails with a sender address matching ^[^@]+@reply\.github\.com$, to avoid the need for every github-originated message to be manually moderated.

The iPXE policy for commit log messages is:

• Messages start with a header line comprising a [subject] tag and a brief description of the change
  • The [subject] tag represents the driver or subsystem being modified. In most cases, this can be deduced by looking at git log for the file(s) being modified by this patch.
  • The brief description should be written in the imperative mood (e.g. “Add PCI device IDs for Intel I218-LM” rather than “Added PCI device IDs for…” or “Adds PCI device IDs for”), and should have no terminating punctuation.
• Trivial patches or patches which simply add a new feature may have an empty log message body.
• Non-trivial bugfix patches should have a log message explaining the problem and the chosen solution.
• All commits must include a Signed-off-by: line
• Credit should be given to all participants in the work leading to the patch, including bug reporters (Reported-by:), testers (Tested-by:), original authors of a completely reimplemented patch (Originally-implemented-by:) etc. Since many contributions come via IRC, the (private) nickmap page can be used to look up full names and e-mail addresses suitable for inclusion in the commit log.
• Patches which have been modified from the code as originally submitted should include a Modified-by: line at the stage at which the modification took place.
• Patches which fix a regression should refer to the commit which introduced the regression, using both the commit ID and the header line. For example: Commit 8ab4b00 (“[libc] Rewrite setjmp() and longjmp()”)

The forum at forum.ipxe.org should be moderated regularly using this process:

• Go to Mod CP > Forums & Posts > Moderation Queue and approve or delete every item in the queue. If you see multiple posts by the same user with more or less the same content, keep the one that seems more complete. If they are all identical, keep the oldest one. All threads and posts that look like spam should be deleted.
• Make sure you recheck the moderation queue until you get a message that there are no more threads or posts available for moderation.
• If you're an administrator, go to Admin CP > Users & Groups > Users immediately after post moderation, login with your username/password again and click the blue Views button at the right above the table and select the Potential spammers view. Our definition of a potential spammer is a user that has registered but not posted anything. Delete all the users in the Potential spammers view. You might need to do this multiple times if there are more than 200 spammy users registered.
• Finally, go to Admin CP > Tools & Maintenance > Recount & Rebuild and click the Recount Statistics button.
• If you go to Admin CP > Tools & Maintenance > Logs > Statistics you should see how many users you deleted by looking at the top of the table after the charts.
• And now you know how to moderate and clean the forum. Do this as often as time permits.