Re: [Feedback request] Decommissioning of unused mailing lists (>5yrs no postings)

Hi Dave,


I note that some of these are still very much active projects but they've
> scattered elsewhere over the years, for example cl-pdf hosts their code at
> github and appears to communicate pretty much exclusively through github
> Issues. Even some active projects hosted at our own gitlab may be
> communicating through gitlab Issues or other means and thus not register
> any mailing list traffic through our mailman.
>

Absolutely. Not suggesting we should clean out any projects on c-l.net in
any way, even the code archives present historical value. The mailing lists
are just one aspect of our hosting infrastructure for projects.


> Anyway, if none of a particular project's mailing lists have been active
> in several years, then it's difficult to make any case for keeping said
> list active, in the face of the overhead costs Erik mentions, especially if
> they can be re-activated easily when needed. However, in the Common Lisp
> space-time continuum, five years is not all that long. I'd be curious what
> the numbers look like if you go back eight or even 10 years?
>

If we go back 8 years the answer is 156 instead of 180. Going back 10 years
with the approach that I took isn't so easy, because I was using the
timestamps from the filesystem to assert the age of the archive files, but
apparently the content of the filesystem has been cleanly set up between 8
and 10 years ago, because the number drops to 0 for 10 years.


> Erik, did you say that you sent verification emails to the list owners of
> these lists?
>

To announce closing the list, you mean? No, not yet. The mails that go to
the owners are mails that request moderation of non-member postings to the
list. When those moderation requests bounce, the site owner gets notified,
requiring action from the infrastructure team.


> Is the list owner by definition the only moderator, or can they assign
> other moderators?
>

Moderators and owners are different roles that can be held by different
(groups) of people (e-mail addresses, really). Lacking moderators,
moderation requests go to the owners.

As I understand it, we can detect non-responsive moderators by seeing mails
> bounce to an admin account, is that right?
>

That's correct. Currently that account is (I think) [email protected].


> If so, how can volunteers sign up to be privvy to those bounced mails and
> perhaps help to mitigate? Is that just another list to sign up for through
> the mailman3 web page?
>

Not sure if creating a mailing list for this purpose would work, but it
would definitely be an interesting use-case for a mailing list! At the
moment, each mailing list has its own set of moderators, though.


> One other question for Erik - are these active lists and archives publicly
> crawl-able?
>

See https://mailman3.common-lisp.net/hyperkitty/?sort=popular&page=1 ; the
HEAD tag contains a tag saying it's both indexable and followable. So, yes:
it's crawlable.

In the old archive, this page:
https://mailman.common-lisp.net/pipermail/able-cvs/ is marked "no index"
but "follow", so it will have its target pages indexed.


-- 
Bye,

Erik.

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