Articles

• Free Elections - getting your money's worth in Romania
• New FTSC website
• Grunged Echomail Deleted - Roy J. Tellason

Free Elections -
getting your money's worth in Romania.

I've got to confess to some feeling of inadequecy in reporting events in Romania. I'm not there, I don't really know the people involved, and my contact started out simply as part of a mass mailing. Nonetheless, a lot of information has come through here, and it's too disturbing to simply ignore.

Region 53 has recently undergone elections to determine a new Regional Coordinator to replace the fired Catalin Bradu. Catalin was fired by Ward Dossche, Z2C, for refusing to implement Ward's order to reinstate the excommunicated Gabi Andrei. Ward named Costin Manda as temporary R53C, charged with conducting an election for a permanent RC.

Candidates in the recently concluded election were Mihai Banciu and, ironically, Catalin Bradu. Catalin claimed victory with a final vote of 11-7, however Ward Dossche awarded the victory to Mihai Banciu based on a 25-13 return which included point nodes.

Catalin is currently petitioning Bob Satti for a "zone independant" regional assignment, to operate his region outside the influence of Ward Dossche. He has announced that the region will leave Fido and function as a network independant of Fido if all else fails.

Those are the facts, as nearly as I can determine them, primarily derived from email and netmail from Catalin Bradu, Ward Dossche, and Codrut Popescu (R53C prior to Catalin). There are many unanswered questions concerning appropriatness, however.

The first concern is the appropriateness of excommunicating Gabi Andrei. While it seems that he was sufficiently annoying to warrant complaints based on "Excessively Annoying Behavior," his own NC would not file such a complaint and even supported Gabri. Is it appropriate that an RC will then implement excommunication? Granted, it was a popular move - but it was done without the consent of the Z2C. Bob Satti informs me via echomail that a node is not normally removed from the nodelist until arguements have been heard at the zone level, so the excommunication appears to be procedurally incorrect. However, there is a concern that nodes should not be forced to connect to those they find offensive.

A second concern is the appropriateness of a ZC firing a popularly-elected RC. Policy gives the ZC this power, but practice has been to honor elections. Further, the Z2C has a policy of allowing elections... does this imply an obligation to back the results of such? Ward Dossche, in email to Bob Satti with a copy to me, claims that Catalin was never popularly elected as RC, only as NC. Codrut Popescu, who conducted the elections in question, explains the actual events in email to me:

---- extracted from email ----

Almost a year ago I was the elected RC53 in Romania. The Network Coordinator position in 530 was open, so I organised elections. You have to know that in R53 there are two networks, 530 and 531. 530 for Bucharest and 531 for the rest of the country. If you still have the nodelists for that period you'll see that 530 was 80% of the total nodes number in R53. Now is over 95%.

The candidates were Alex Sovu, Catalin Bradu and Gabi Andrei. They gained 8, 11 and 3 votes, respectively. It is to be mentioned that from these 22 votes, 2 were from 531. The NC position in 530 was so very important for 531 so I allowed the nodes (very few) from 531 to express their votes in these elections.

So Catalin Bradu gained most of the votes. There was a big rivalry between Catalin and Alex, the last one was about to leave the network because of his failure in the elections. At the same time I was involved in a new position in a bank and when you're 27 years old there are some priorities in life. So I appointed Catalin as RC and Alex as NC after both of them agreed to stick together for the good of the network. Mr. Ward Dossche was informed about this elections at the end, and he agreed with the replacement. Though, he was not announced about this shifting in the *C hierarchy due to my retirement.

---- end extract ----

It would appear that Ward Dossche is technically correct that Catalin was not specifically elected as RC, but, from Codrut's description of events, it seems to me that his appointment was in order and reflected the will of the voters.

A third concern is the appearance that the outcome of the recent election was predetermined. This appearance comes from two sources:

1. A netmail message from Ward Dossche to Costin Manda instructing him that Mihai Banciu was the winner of the election despite an early return which favored Catalin by about 2-1.
2. The inclusion of point nodes in the final vote count, despite the assertion that points were only permitted advisory input throughout the election. Since the points essentially determined the election, this is a vital issue. Ward Dossche claims in email that points were traditionally allowed to vote in R53 elections, but both Catalin Bradu and Codrut Popescu inform me that point nodes have never had a vote in any election until Ward included their totals in this most recent vote count.

A fourth concern is the appropriateness of resolving political incompatibilities by entire regions leaving Fido. Though this may be a mere threat, it's hardly conducive to the concerns of many that nodelist shrinkage must be halted somehow. Of course, it may be the only way which Catalin Bradu can get the "zone independant number" he's asking for... by forming a new zone. I'm not sure how Bob Satti can issue a "zone independant number."

New FTSC website

Hi Folks,

The FTSC website and anonymous FTP site have new names.

The new URL for the website is

http://www.ftsc.org

The anonymous FTP server is now to be found at ftp.ftsc.org

If you have links to the website I'd be grateful if you could update them. http://www.piglets.com/ftsc (the old URL) and http://www.ftsc.org are exactly the same place but the latter is clearly easier to remember.

More importantly....

If you are mirroring the FTP site on ftp.piglets.com then you should now mirror ftp.ftsc.org.

I will maintain the old archive for a brief time, but it's location (pub/FTSC) is /not/ the same as the new location which is actually in ftp.piglets.com/ftp.ftsc.org.

So if you don't change over before I remove the old archive you could have a problem ;-).

The CGI script on the webpages is already accessing the new document repositry.

CT.

---
* Origin: - FTSC Member - (2:443/13)

Grunged Echomail Deleted.

John Souvestre wrote in a message to Roy J Tellason:

JS> This is to inform you of what seems to be a discrepancy
JS> between a message from your system and the currently
JS> accepted specifications for echo mail.

JS> Because the message appeared to be grunged, or a dupe, it
JS> was deleted in order to protect the rest of the echo mail
JS> distribution system. This copy is sent to you for
JS> information purposes, to help you find the source of the
JS> problem and fix it.

JS> The discrepancy noted in the message, as received here, was:

JS> 1) Header and text of 31,814 bytes exceeds maximum of
JS> 31,000 bytes.

JS> The message was in the 10TH_AMD area.

(...)

I post some fairly lengthy messages in that echo fairly often, and have never heard of any 31,000 byte length limitation. About that "to protect the rest of the echo mail distribution system" part, are there people out there who carry that echo who are running software that can't handle a message of that size? I've certainly never received any complaints, excepting those who are running some really old offline readers that truncate stuff at 150 lines or whatever.

As far as "currently accepted specifications" for echo mail, where are these specifications noted? It certainly doesn't appear in the current copy of BOFAQ901.TXT that's on my system here. The closest seems to be this part here:

5) Due to the limitations of some current software, the Backbone can not guarantee delivery of messages in excess of 13,000 bytes.

Backbone Hubs are encouraged to use message processing software which allows larger messages, preferably up to 64K bytes, to be handled.

There's a BIG difference between "cannot guarantee delivery" and "your message has been deleted because..."

As far as I'm concerned, this amounts to nothing more than simple censorship based on unpublished criteria. My position as moderator of 10TH_AMD is that you either carry the whole echo or don't carry it at all.

email: roy.j.tellason%tanstaaf@frackit.com