I’m thinking we should migrate u3acommunities from stackcp / hand made pages to something better. I’ll be updating this page as ideas occur – actual work won’t start until winter time.
Drop me a mail (peter@plord.co.uk) if you have any thoughts or feature requests.
Current issues
- Original funding from Tom Holloway has been exhausted (expires Feb 2027)
- Routing email through u3acommunities with our membership levels hits limits (so we currently route through plord.co.uk + smtp2go). Full routing through a paid provider gets expensive quickly.
- Can be slow
- No support for running server applications (see below)
- No notifications when things go wrong (out of funding / ssh disabled)
- Did have certain IP address blocked and couldn’t fix
- Mailpoet will exceed free plan subscriber limits at some point
- Mailpoet editing is clunky and auto emails arn’t a good match to monthly meetings (eg can’t simply send an email 4 days before the event starts)
High level thinking
- Phase 1 – find new hosting platform that more closely matches our current needs
- DNS management
- Web hosting – initially wordpress as-is (unless alternative works well quickly)
- Email list routing – initially through mailpoet as-is
- Group email management (ie group leaders)
- Easy management (install, changes, logs, backups, IP blocking etc) – eg https://yunohost.org
- Easy to expand (add more memory / cpus / applications)
- Document and use as a basis for a new computing group talk
- Phase 2 – explore new features & alternatives
- Mailpoet alternative (easier to send emails)
- WordPress alternative (ghost?)
- Running event generation
- u3a.social (friendica + email)
- Better video conferencing
- Video storage (peertube?)
- Office, eg host our slides (onlyoffice?)
- ….
- Funding via Jean & George Taylor