So, almost exactly a year ago I said I wanted to transition the lists to either GroupServer or Mailman 3, mainly for the sake of a better web interface that includes the ability to post online (to reduce friction for new users who might not want to sign up for 3 mailing lists just to dip their toes in). ...And then I got anxious and disappeared from Agora altogether.
Well, I'm back and I thought it time to look into that again. First I tried setting up GroupServer. The code felt kind of bloated - took like 10 minutes to install, mostly just to deal with the massive number of Python packages it's split into. (And since I was trying to use Docker, I had to wait for that install over and over. I gave up on Docker.) Still, I eventually got it to work, and, yep, the web interface is reasonably pretty… But then I tried sending a test email, and noticed that the email I got had been wrapped in a garish HTML header/footer. Then I tried sending a long message, and noticed that the email was cut off - very early, in fact, after only 10 lines of text. Combining those two, the impression I got was more of a forum notification than a real mailing list post. I didn't see any option to change either behavior, in either the (minimal) per-user settings or the administration settings. I could have tried to hack the code to just send mail plaintext+unmolested, but the aforementioned bloatedness and confusing setup made me leery of messing with the code, and I still had an alternative. So today I installed Mailman 3 (+ HyperKitty + Postorius), which predictably was a lot more annoying than it should be, partly because it's split into three projects for no good reason. But so far, impressions are better than GroupServer. I like the Web UI slightly less, but it's not bad, and it does allow sending messages from the browser - plaintext, mercifully. You can see it here: https://list.agoranomic.org/ The installation is currently entirely separate from the existing Mailman 2 list, but I did import a copy of the list archives to Hyperkitty so anyone interested can get a better feel for the UI. Don't try posting there, but feel free to join and post on agora-mm3test. I'd like to change the HTML so it shares the site header (and maybe other styling) from https://agoranomic.org. The eventual plan would be to migrate the existing lists to Mailman 3. Existing subscriptions and subscription settings would be brought over; the base mbox archive would be continued from the existing lists; all existing messages would be added to the HyperKitty site; I'd also make a static copy of the existing Mailman 2 web archive, so archive links would continue to work, although that would be separate from the new site. In short, minimal disruption. Thoughts? Concerns? Suggestions? Known issues: - The Hyperkitty importer is less than perfect. It doesn't like messages with no Message-Id, or with non-ascii sender addresses, of which we apparently have a bunch. Also, messages without a normally formatted Date header get marked as new, including a report ais523 sent in 2009 with the delightful "Date: some time near the end of July", and some messages from Magu in 2003 with no Date at all. - The test list adds a signature; it shouldn't. Also need to make sure the subject line munging works the same way as currently. - I should switch to something other than sqlite. - The initial indexing takes a rather long time in Xapian and produces a huge index compared to the input size. Maybe I should try switching the backend to Solr or something. - Hyperkitty is kind of slow. I tried some things to make it faster already, but not enough I guess...
