launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Barry Warsaw <barry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Dustin, thanks for starting the conversation here.  Of course, I'm no
longer on the Launchpad team, so I can't speak to resources or timelines.  My
primary "free time" hacking these days is on Mailman 3 and I made some good
progress over the holiday break toward my goal of integrating it with
Launchpad (e.g. I actually got list creation working through MM3's REST API).
I did end up getting side-tracked on some yak-shaving but I'm going to try to
make another spike on integration soon.

One thing is important to understand though: while Mailman comes with a
bundled archiver (called Pipermail), Launchpad does not use it.  Launchpad
uses MHonArc primarily for the (configurable) ability to retain stable URLs
when the archives are regenerated from scratch.  This is a long standing
deficiency in Pipermail.

Despite the bundling, Pipermail is not Mailman and will probably be separated
out in MM3.  The state of the art in FLOSS archivers is pitiful though, with
almost no progress that I'm aware of in *years*.  I guess my dream job would
be 6 months to fix that.  No, I am not going to hack on MHonArc
(<cough>Perl</cough> :).

On Jan 05, 2011, at 05:57 PM, Dustin Kirkland wrote:

> 1) I've subscribed to a couple of Google Groups in order to
>communicate with some upstream open source communities.  I've really
>found the user experience to be quite outstanding, actually.
>Searching threads is really effective, it's nice that it supports
>voting responses up/down, one-page threaded display, easy to
>subscribe/unsubscribe, lack of spam -- all of which have been quite
>handy and impressive to me as a Mailman traditionalist and Google
>Groups newbie.

Things like searching threads, voting, one-page threaded display (I actually
don't like GG's implementation of this) are all archiver features, but yeah I
also wish we had them.

> 2) The burden as a Launchpad Mailing List moderator pruning spam
>became unbearable on some of my mailing lists and at some point and I
>just simply gave up moderating messages :-(

IIRC, there's a long-standing RT about imposing spam filters on the lists.l.n
incoming MTA.  That would go a long way toward helping this situation out.
Also, it would be nice to expose moderation in the LP API.  Finally, and I
don't think this would be too hard, we could extend the "standing" idea into
negative territory.  Meaning: right now if you post as a nonmember to a few
mailing lists, and they all get approved, you're deemed to be a Launchpad
Member in Good Standing and your subsequent posts will go through unmoderated
to any other mailing list.  By adding a "mark as spam" button to the moderator
interface, we could do a similar crowdsourcing in the opposite direction.  If
a poster gets marked as spam 3 times (as opposed to just being marked as an
off-topic discard), then we'd mark them as a Member in Poor Standing, and
automatically reject or discard their postings to any other mailing list.
That doesn't necessary help you moderate your existing list, though some kind
of sweep and cull could be implemented.

Archiver improvements aside, the above would not be a lot of work and it would
probably not touch Mailman too much, so any Launchpad hacker could probably
take it on.  I would of course be willing to help out with any
Mailman-specific details.

As for the archiver, heck I've been practically *begging* someone to write a
killer FLOSS archiver, or just improve Pipermail, for at least a decade ;).
We might instead investigate working more closely with mail-archive.com (who
already archives all our public lists) or Gmane.

-Barry

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