launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Curtis Hovey <curtis.hovey@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2011-01-05 at 17:57 -0600, Dustin Kirkland wrote:
> Howdy Launchpad-dev!
> 
> I'm not subscribed to this list, so I would very much appreciate it if
> you would keep me CC'd to any responses.  And I'm CC'ing Barry, as I
> discussed this with him in IRC and he suggested that I post these
> questions here :-)
> 
> I'm curious if there are any general (even long term) intentions to
> augment Launchpad's mailing lists features?
> 
> I've been thinking about this recently for two reasons:
>  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.
>  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 :-(

I believe spam was fixed a few months ago. Launchpad hosted lists I see
are now a handful of spams a month where are the canonical/ubuntu lists
are getting hundreds. Lp only accepts emails from known email addresses,
but there was no sanity checking that a user could use the address --
teams cannot send emails, nor can non-active Lp users. Most spam claims
to be from a team, which is discarded automatically.

Mail from teams were automatically removed from moderation queue. I
checked staging's data and see that as of the the last week of December.
There are no messages that claim to be from teams There are only a
handful of teams that have more than 10 queued message:
           name            | count 
---------------------------+-------
 ecryptfs-devel            |    47
 ecryptfs                  |   453
 ubuntu-cyclists           |   105
 ayatana                   |    39

None of the messages in the queues are after 2010-11-01. I think the
problem is fixed. If you have concern about your existing backlog, make
me an admin and I will discard the spam.

> I just started considering the possibility of migrating the mailing
> lists functionality for some of my projects from Launchpad to Google
> Groups, but obviously I would much rather keep all of my project
> hosting functionality within Launchpad.
> 
> Can anyone speak to the future of mailing lists in Launchpad?  Any
> intentions on improving the archive-browsing interface?  What about
> search?  How about tapping into a modern, social-media approach (a la
> GoogleGroups / StackExchange) in which responses are voted upon?  Any
> chance of ever implementing some server side spam filtering?

I confess that I am biased when we discuss the archive. Note the
official bug tag:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bugs?field.tag=ml-archive-sucks

I believe we intended use a hosting service, but days before the
release, the arrangement collapsed. We choose MHonArc at the last
minute. MHonArc is unmaintained and it offers no means to integrate
archives into Launchpad. Lp users expect messages to link back to
Launchpad artefacts like bugs. I personally want an archive I can
subscribe to for email or RSS so that I can get read-only messages for
teams I am not a member of.

There are no plans update the archive. I think this kind of change
requires feature level work -- this is more than a few bugs.

-- 
__Curtis C. Hovey_________
http://launchpad.net/

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