Executive summary
As of today I toggled on the feature that stops users from being able to publish new articles. My plan is to turn Zig NEWS into an RSS aggregator. Existing posts will be published on GitHub so that authors can recover them and publish them elsewhere if they wish to do so.
More in detail
Zig NEWS was created to allow Zig community members to share blog posts more easily. My argument since the beginning has been that you should always aim to own your content, but that Zig NEWS could help those of us who don't want to put in the effort to setup a full personal blog.
To that end I quickly setup an instance of Forem, the CMS developed by the dev.to people, and opened the door of zig.news to people. This worked reasonably well for a while but over time spam has become an increasingly annoying problem to deal with. People have asked me to get moderators to help fight the spam more quickly but I never agreed because I'm more interested in finding a better solution that does not involve shifting operational burden onto others.
Since then I also developed Zine which is an extremely handy way of setting up a static website (which you can host for free on GitHub Pages, for example) which in turn also means that the value add of Zig NEWS, as currently implemented, is not as good as it might have been before then.
For this reason I think it's time to start working towards transitioning away from FOREM, in order to kill all spam issues once and for all (plus sparing me some annoying operational issues) and to start capitalizing on all the effort that other community members have put in creating their own personal blogs and devlogs.
The plan is to turn zig.news into an RSS feed aggregator. Users won't be able to submit individual entries but rather full RSS feeds of blogs that are considered interesting for the Zig community.
The initial implementation will not have support for likes and comments, but those might return in the future in a second pass.
If you posted something on Zig NEWS and would like to repost it somewhere else, please feel free to do so (your posts, not other people's).
Once we delete Forem, all posts will be made available on GitHub so no rush.
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