I would prefer to pool our efforts and resources into making the existing toolserver more useful and more powerful. But then, as a toolserver admin an employee of WMDE, I'm biased :)
Anyway, the most efficient and, at least for us, easiest way to contribute would be a donation to wmde appropriated to be spent on the toolserver project. In the past there has been some confusion about how to best do this, we are working on sorting this out now. If anyone is interested in donating money or hardware or some other assets, please contact me.
If you feel like setting up your own, we are happy to cooperate. But be warned that it not only takes money, but it also takes a lot of time and effort to manage something like this (thanks river!).
-- daniel
Lars Aronsson schrieb:
Earlier this spring, there was some talk, perhaps within the newly founded Wikimedia Norway chapter, to set up a common server in Norway for analysing database dumps and running bot scripts, i.e. a toolserver with everything except the database replication.
Did this happen? Are there a bunch of such servers around the world today? Is there a list of such servers? Should we encourage people to do this, or should we try to concentrate work (and pool resources) to the (real / German) toolserver?
Concentrating to fewer servers has the advantage that people can get a single account there, and join each project that is already there. Distributing over multiple, independent servers has the advantage of offloading the central server. It might also seem like an attractive project for a new Wikimedia chapter, since a server of their own looks like an achievement in itself. But it is also a waste of resources to maintain separate servers, if these resources could instead be pooled.