Re: [UG-ADMINS] Mailinglist, Archive and such stuff

Also, for better or worse, this mailing list is also archived and searchable on grokbase. I’m not sure when or how this started. I assume they just grab and archive all PHP.net mailing lists.

http://grokbase.com/g/php/ug-admins

-Ben


> On Feb 1, 2016, at 8:25 AM, Ben Ramsey <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for digging in and doing that research, Andreas.
> 
> As for the history of this group, if anyone is interested, I wrote a short history of the project here: https://benramsey.com/projects/php-groups/
> 
> The reason messages behind the news web interface at http://news.php.net/ do not show up in search engine results is because of the current robots.txt file. It looks like Bing might show results, however.
> 
> https://github.com/php/web-news/blob/338cd0814fb6a37e0eee9044d9f5257ceba0921f/robots.txt
> 
> Call it “security by obscurity” and “light privacy,” but the primary reason for this is to ensure the NNTP server doesn’t receive too much traffic and crash. With that in mind, and if privacy is your concern, I don’t think it can be relied upon as a permanent solution.
> 
> PHP.net used to have search functionality on that web interface, but again, it caused too much strain on the NNTP server, so it was removed. I’ve submitted a pull request that slightly improves performance, but probably not by enough to allow the NNTP server to be queried a lot: https://github.com/php/web-news/pull/6
> 
> Finally, it’s worth noting that PHP.net is considering moving the mailing lists to a more modern system with better tooling. I’m not sure what that is right now or when this will occur. I’m trying to find out more information about this.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ben
> 
> 
> 
>> On Feb 1, 2016, at 8:06 AM, Andreas Heigl <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi All.
>> 
>> I did some research to find out more about this mailinglist as it
>> badgered me what all the hype is about.
>> 
>> As far as I could find this list has been moved from phpgroups.com some
>> years ago to php.net to have a better support also from the technical
>> side. At least that was what I read from Ben Ramseys first post to this
>> list[1]. So the list itself came to existence without official
>> "sponsoring" whatsoever. There is also no listing of this mailinglist on
>> the official Mailinglist-page of php.net[2], and as the list itself is
>> prefixed "ug" and not "php" on the news-server[3] I find it problematic
>> to think of the ug-admins-list as an official mailinglist of the
>> PHP-Project. For me it's a list that is thankfully hosted on php.net and
>> more thankfully with a php.net list-address but that's about it.
>> 
>> Regarding the privacy of the list, I couldn't find a search that
>> included the ug-admins-list. But I might not have lookerd hard enough,
>> so if yomeone can correct me there, I'm fine.
>> 
>> In my eyes there are only two points where the content of the list is
>> exposed to the public:
>> 
>> 1. The list-archive at http://news.php.net/ug.admins and
>> 2. the nntp-interface at news://news.php.net
>> 
>> Both rely on the nntp-protocol, as the web-interface is nothing but a
>> http-interface to the underlying news-server. And as far as I know there
>> is a possibility to use nntp with authentication so it could be
>> implemented to allow access to that list (or any other list) only to
>> known users. But I do not know whether that is wanted on the side of
>> PHP.net.
>> 
>> A better searchability of the mailinglists has more than once been
>> discussed as far as I know but there has never been an improvement. But
>> I'm not sure whether no one improved it or the improvement hasn't been
>> added to the website. Currently some of the mailinglists are searchable
>> via a google-search. But that doesn't work for all of them.
>> 
>> Why all that?
>> 
>> For me a certain amount of privacy on the ug-admins-Mailinglist should
>> be possible. There are discussions like the one Beth started about how
>> to deal with certain members but there are also discount-codes for
>> usergroups that should not go out to the public. Currently they only go
>> out to the public when someone diggs through the news-list on
>> http://news.php.net. I'd call that "security by obscurity" but for me
>> that's good enough. As currently the list is not searchable.
>> 
>> So if we want to enable searching on this mailinglist (and that was what
>> started the whole discussion as far as I remember) we will have to think
>> about how to be able to hide this search from "the general public" - If
>> we want to do that at all
>> 
>> So for me the privacy-question has been solved and is sufficient at the
>> current setup but the searchability could need some improvement. And
>> there is for me the question, can we improve the searchability of all
>> those PHP-mailinglists by improving it for the UG-Admins-list? And is
>> that something the PHP.net-project is willing to support?
>> 
>> My 2 cent I wanted to share with you.
>> 
>> Cheers
>> 
>> Andreas
>> 
>> [1] http://news.php.net/ug.admins/2
>> [2] http://php.net/mailing-lists.php
>> [3] http://news.php.net
>> -- 
>>                                                             ,,,
>>                                                            (o o)
>> +---------------------------------------------------------ooO-(_)-Ooo-+
>> | Andreas Heigl                                                       |
>> | mailto:[email protected]                  N 50°22'59.5" E 08°23'58" |
>> | http://andreas.heigl.org                       http://hei.gl/wiFKy7 |
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>> | http://hei.gl/root-ca                                               |
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>