Parts of a technical legacy
The late Alexander Bartolich (the "Alba" part of "Albasani") was a very active participant in all things Usenet: operator of news.albasani.net, member of the Big 8 Management Board, "Umsetzungsbeauftragter" ("control guy") of the Moderation of de.admin.news.announce (roughly the counterpart of the Big 8 Board for the German language Usenet hierachy de.*) and more.
His early death came as a shock to the Usenet community.
- Statement of the Big 8 Management Board in news.announce.important
- Statement of the Moderation of de.admin.news.announce in de.admin.news.announce
Unfortunately, his technical legacy was mostly lost as news.albasani.net finally went down after a hardware failure in 2020. The same machine was hosting some software repositories at svn.schnuerpel.eu that were - to the best of my knowledge - not mirrored elsewhere, containing enhancements to the INN software running on news.albasani.net (named "Schnuerpel") and a web application to moderate Usenet newsgroups (named "Huhu").
I had downloaded (snv checkout) the repositories on 2012-07-18, about a week after we lost Alexander, but got just the files, not the history, as is typical for SVN repositories (in contrast to git). As the complete repositories couldn't be recovered until today, I'll upload the shallow clones here to share what I was able to preserve.
(Yes, the names are as nonsensical in German as they sound in English. That was the point, I think.)
Authentication, access rights, cancel locks, etc. (INN 2.4 or newer)
Quoting from the README:
Schnuerpel is a collection of scripts used on server news.albasani.net.
[...]
Since Schnuerpel is not a monolithic piece of software it is quite possible to use only selected parts or disable optional features, e.g. mysql.
Scripts can be categorized into three groups according to the environment they are used in:
- plain command line
- scheduled invocation through crond
- event triggered invocation by INN (access control, filters)
Web application to moderate Usenet groups.
Quoting from the documentation:
Huhu is a web application to moderate Usenet groups.
[...]
Roman Racine developed Huhu in 2007 to moderate de.soc.familie.vaeter.
In 2009 he adapted it to easily run multiple instances.
In autumn 2009 Alexander Bartolich took over development, adding support for CSS, multiple languages, and procmail.
I really have no idea what this project is about.