Cleaning up the Planet

For a while I’ve noticed that Planet Ubuntu configurations are in a sort of mess. Officially, individuals who are Ubuntu members and some other organizations (more details) can post to the planet. But when someone’s membership expires, cleaning the config is a painful and tedious task. Additionally, there is also no way, other than manual, to verify if the folks with their feeds listed in the planet config file are people with Ubuntu membership. In this regard, I brought this matter up with the Community Council.

Cleaning up the Mess

The community council has decided that every feed would be ‘owned’ by an Ubuntu member whose launchpad ID should be in the nick field. This will help us run a script to check if all the ‘owners’ of the feeds are Ubuntu members. If there are team / organization feeds, an Ubuntu member should put their launchpad ID in the nick field and this individual would be responsible for the feeds of that team. Please note that its OK for an Ubuntu member to sponsor multiple feeds. That way a member of the community can be the sponsor for their own feed as well as an affiliated organisation or sub-project, like in the example below.

[http://feeds.feedburner.com/nigel-ubuntu] name = Nigel Babu face = nigelbabu.png nick = nigel  [http://ubuntuclassroom.wordpress.com/feed/?mrss=off] name = Ubuntu Classroom face = ubuntuclassroom.png nick = ubuntuclassroom 

In this example, I should be changing the nick for my feed to nick = nigelbabu since my Launchpad ID is nigelbabu. For the classroom feed, I should change nick = ubuntuclassroom to nick = nigelbabu since I’m an Ubuntu member part of the team and I’m willing to own that feed.