On Monday, November 22, 2021 at 10:16:49 AM UTC-5 Jens Axel Søgaard wrote:
> There is no need to rush things however. > In due course maybe the number of users on the forum will > grow to outshadow the number of participants on the mailing list, > but it will take some years. > This was my opinion until the last few weeks, but I've become convinced that doing nothing is no longer a viable option. It appears that some Gmail spam filter has decided that racket-users@googlegroups.com is a suspicious email address. It seems like roughly half of the legitimate traffic on the list is never reaching me and being marked as spam (at one of two or three hops on its way—but I have every reason to believe the situation would be as bad or worse for a new subscriber with a less convoluted email setup, especially since even mail from people I've corresponded with directly is being marked as spam). This seems reasonable, actually, since the Google Groups filters don't seem to be stopping a very high proportion of total traffic on the list from consisting of all-caps spam in Italian with some obviously-off-topic keywords. I understood John's email not as a threat to shut down this list immediately, but as a call for those (like me) who have been skeptical of Discourse to give it a serious try and look for any actual, concrete problems, with an eye toward making it the primary Racket communication channel. The points raised about the terms of service seem like a good example of this. Hopefully they can be fixed. If Discourse's "mailing-list mode" works well enough that people like me can treat it like a generic mailing list, while people who want a fancy web app can use it, that seems ideal. The discussion yesterday about starting new topics by email seems important, if that's the goal: https://racket.discourse.group/t/how-to-enable-mailing-list-mode/167/3 As someone not involved in the decision-making process, I also want to say (more in response to previous discussions than this one) that hosting a high-volume public mailing list like racket-users is not a trivial job. I have enough experience running Postfix to know I shouldn't volunteer. Take note, for example, of the multi-billion-dollar corporation that isn't doing an adequate job hosting this list currently. It's also worth emphasizing that Discourse is free/libre and open source software under the GPL-2.0-or-later. Google Groups is not! Finally, I think this would be a great area for the Software Freedom Conservancy to provide support. I'm sure Racket isn't the only project facing these questions. At a minimum, it would be good to have them review the legal boilerplate, since some of them are lawyers and I, for one, am not. If there were some concrete reason not to use the hosting generously offered at no charge by the company Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. (but at first glance they seem to be doing many things right), perhaps the Conservancy could provide hosting for Racket and other member projects. If ultimately we were to determine that Discourse wouldn't work as a mailing-list replacement—but I think we should seriously try it before jumping to that conclusion!—I've noted before that the Conservancy hosts a few mailing lists: https://lists.sfconservancy.org Mailman 2 would be a step in the wrong direction as far as friendly UI, but I've been impressed by Mailman 3 with HyperKitty (also more than the Google Groups web UI, which I've never especially liked): e.g. https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org/ Presumably they will upgrade their server to Debian 11 and get that improvement (https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/mailman3-full). -Philip -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/858cc8d7-7dbb-46ea-b1ad-d2a32a4c722dn%40googlegroups.com.
