A better members-and-friends page

[h-lame]

The static list of names could probably be more interesting and inviting to people who want to find out about the sort of people they are likely to meet at an LRUG meeting.

At the very least we could pull in some avatars from somewhere (gravatar? twitter?). But perhaps there's a more dynamic source of information we could use to generate the list (attendee info from lanyrd, followers of the lrug twitter account, ???)

Of course, maybe the page is always going to be out of date or off-putting to prospective attendees so we should drop it entirely. It is also currently very out of date so we do need a "recruitment-drive" to update it if we do keep it.

[MikeRogers0]

I stumbled upon how another group handles their members page.

https://virtualcoffee.io/members/ - I quite like how these people approached it. It looks like they setup a github issue encouraging people to make a PR with their info. Plus it's pretty nice how they let people specify if they're looking to be hired.

What do you think of it?

[h-lame]

Yeah, I don't know. I think something that's not really live and dynamic will just run into the same problem we have with the current page, eventually it'll be out of date. I do like the idea of some kind of "these are the kinds of people who you might meet currently at LRUG", but I don't have any ideas for how to keep it up-to-date in the least effort inducing way.

I think my current thinking tends towards just deleting the page. Maybe redirecting the url to https://twitter.com/lrug/followers or a section on the readme about attendees.

[chrislo]

Would a "people who have spoken recently" page solve any of the issues? I agree that keeping an up-to-date list of "members" (whatever that means) is likely to rot very quickly.

[MikeRogers0]

Would a "people who have spoken recently" page solve any of the issues?

I really like this idea! I imagine the legwork would mostly be on adding additional information to the meetings Frontmatter.

If @h-lame think this is good, I'd happily mock something up in a PR 👍

[h-lame]

Yeah, I think a speakers page is of more use (and more likely to remain up-to-date) than a members page. I think turning data/coverage/*.yml into data/talks/*.yml and putting the speaker data in with the coverage data we already have might be more flexible than putting it into frontmatter for individual meeting pages. Mostly because it'll be "cheaper" to load 1-per-year-scale yaml files and massage the data than it will to load 12-per-year-scale meeting pages and then extract the frontmatter yaml to massage it. But! I'm not really sure on that - might just need to try both out and see. Edging pretty close to wanting An Actual DB at this point, and that feels like a step too far for sure.

If you want to take a crack at it @MikeRogers0 then I think that'd be cool. Implementor's choice wins probably.

I know "cool URIs don't change" and all that, but I think I would probably just 410 /members-and-friends rather than redirecting it to the new /speakers page, WDYT? No other obvious redirect target on the main site, and I don't think there's a relevant part on readme.lrug.org either. Maybe https://twitter.com/lrug/followers at a push?

[h-lame]

I know "cool URIs don't change" and all that, but I think I would probably just 410 /members-and-friends rather than redirecting it to the new /speakers page, WDYT? No other obvious redirect target on the main site, and I don't think there's a relevant part on readme.lrug.org either. Maybe https://twitter.com/lrug/followers at a push?

comment #5

vs.

I think my current thinking tends towards just deleting the page. Maybe redirecting the url to https://twitter.com/lrug/followers or a section on the readme about attendees.

comment #2

lol - repeat yourself much?

[MikeRogers0]

I don't have a strong preference, but I'd lead towards redirecting /members-and-friends > /speakers :)

My only objection (Which is weak at best) for redirecting to https://twitter.com/lrug/followers is someone could follow us with a negative twitter name, or description.

[lazyatom]

I think we should just remove the page; redirecting to the homepage.

[MikeRogers0]

I'd be wary about redirecting to the homepage, from what I gather it's bad practise.

[lazyatom]

That article is about blanket redirection of 404s to boost SEO, but I'm proposing a single redirect to avoid a broken URL, so I'm not sure the same situation; I don't think we're going to be meaningfully penalised.

[h-lame]

Perhaps a custom 410 page with manual onward links because there is no meaningful on-site replacement would be best. Something like

This page is gone because keeping it up to date was painful and there's no meaningful replacement.
If you do want to know who you might see at an LRUG meeting why not try:

• our organising team on https://readme.lrug.org/#organising-team
• our list of recent speakers on https://lrug.org/speakers
• who is interested in LRUG at https://twitter.com/lrug/followers

P. sure we can use the .htaccess.erb file to set the status of a /members-and-friends to 410 instead of 200.