Badg.us domain transfer & renewal - contact owners?

Community Ops
#1

When we moved badg.us over to Community Ops infrastructure, we also transferred the domain to me under GoDaddy.

Domain is up for renewal and expires April 15. I would prefer to move this over to Mozilla but have lost track of who the responsible owner within Mozilla is and who would be best to work to get this transferred to Mozilla’s domain registrar.

I’m currently in too much money-wise to renew this one.

Help?

#2

Transferring to Mozilla used to be an easy process

Looks like they’ve gotten stricter though

Will need to show that people still care about this for renewal to work

#3

Where is this process documented?

Who currently cares about this website?

#4

I’m not sure the process is documented. I’ll ask.

I don’t think many people, if any, still care about it

1 Like
#5

I don’t know that badg.us has an owner, or users. I think we should
evaluate whether it’s worth it to use our resources on this.

1 Like
#6

Something for Thursday’s meeting?

#7

Based on https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/badg-us-server-is-down/586/17, I would infer that they got tired of waiting for fixes and moved on. That’s in no way our fault, as we have limited resources, but I think we should consider dropping badg.us unless someone expresses a strong need for it.

https://badges.mozilla.org/ seems to duplicate the functionality of badg.us - does anyone know if one preceded the other?

#8

The latter was supposed to be the white label version of the former.

#9

No, this kind if thing shouldn’t be handled in a meeting except to assign someone to make sure it’s sorted.

Perhaps @emma_irwin could give us advice on who to follow up with?

#10

Is there a point of running a live instance of the white label version of the badges app? Since the project is already forked I fear that nobody will maintain the original code anyway.

1 Like
#11

This so much. We’ve already had to alter the code to get it to run (props to @jamesboston) , and it will require a lot more work to make it scalable.

Making new badges on badgus has been broken for a long time, with nobody mentioning it or pushing a fix so I don’t think there is anybody interested in it anymore.

#12

Just found this thread. Some back story, for what it’s worth: I started badg.us on my own personal server as a demo to get support to launch badges.mozilla.org on Mozilla hardware. My intent was always to build a badge service to specifically support the Mozilla community.

But, word spread about badg.us, and many parties began using my demo - e.g. K-12 teachers, libraries, other community groups beyond Mozilla. This quickly grew into something I couldn’t support, and so I planned to shut it down. I offered the badg.us domain and database dumps to anyone interested in taking it over, and some folks on the Open Badges and Community IT teams accepted. I don’t think those Open Badge folks are actually still with Mozilla, though.

I’m not sure who that leaves as a stakeholder for badg.us. Not me, because I was going to shut it down. In a perfect world, it would be great to transition any users of that thing over to something else. But, that was not something I ever had time or interest to do.

#13

The domain has expired but the aws instance where it’s hosted is still up. Does anyone know if it’s scheduled to be terminated any time soon? If it goes away that would make it harder to figure out how to migrate data (I assume).

#14

(moved James’ question from the Participation thread to here since it’s a technical one - posting this reply to make sure people get notifications)

#15

I don’t think we have a concrete plan to terminate it yet, but, on the other hand, I’m not sure if there’s any data that’s worth saving.

#16

There is, that’s what we’re in the middle of sorting out with the Participation team.

#17

badg.us used a modified django setup. Looking the media folder for content, there’s some png files that look like badges, but only a few. None of them are mozilla related things as far as I can tell. If it’s only badges for mozilla stuff you are looking to migrate, there might not be anything.

It would be easier to see what’s there if the site was running, of course. The site is down because of an sql connection error. It looks like the error can only be fixed by someone with admin access to the mysql server. It’s denying connections.

#18

Here’s my proposal from our triage meeting:

  • We get the site working again so someone can inventory the badges, how many types of badges there are and how many total badges were issued.
  • From there we talk to the Participation people again to figure out how much effort this problem is worth
  • If it becomes apparent that the site was actively used by people we can’t find, we may need to renew the domain to put the site back up with a static page to let people know to contact us
  • Possibly we can pull contact information and do a mass email to users instead?

@jamesboston can you check if the site is working now? if not let @tad know.

#19

Keep in mind youi’ll need to stand it up under a new hostname. badg.us will cease to resolve at some point.

#20

The ec2 instance hosting badg.us is at http://ec2-54-88-56-79.compute-1.amazonaws.com/en-US/ but the site is still down.