News-Feeds:
Wanted: Postfix and Mailman specialist
It is about 4 years ago that Michael started to set up a new mailing list server for the TYPO3 community. Back then it was a rather simple task to set up a server with mailing list and newsgroup access for about six mailing lists (yeah, back then it was really easy to keep track of flame wars! ;-)).
Looking at the server today, we are really happy to see that it has grown much, but still runs very well. (Meanwhile, most of the work is just spent to help users who cannot post to a mailing list for some reason. In most of all cases, this happens simply because they are using different email-addresses than those which they subscribed with...)
However, there are other recurring and non-recurring tasks that require a lot of work:
- Creating a new mailing list involves several other steps: creating a newsgroup, setting up the synchronization between mail and news, testing, etc.
- There are some lists which are publically writable, and there is currently no spam protection used for them. All spam should be filtered out reliably (f.e. by using SpamAssassin).
- It has been planned for a long time to move the domains "lists.netfielders.de" and "news.netfielders.de" to a new "lists.typo3.org". Once again this will require a lot of planning and work due the migration.
Since Michael wants to focus more on his work inside the Core Team, he has obviously not much time to work on any of these tasks in near future. So we are currently looking for someone who wants to take over this job:
If you have good Postfix and Mailman experience and are willing to work on these tasks, you are the person we are looking for right now!
If you are interested in these topics or have further questions, you can contact us at participate(at)typo3.org.
Thanks for listening!
Sebastian & Michael
comments
May 13, 2007
20:49
With SourceForge (who we already use for SVN development and who provide a simlar mailing list feature) we have been kept from implementing cool stuff (SVN ACLs, SVN hooks, ...) which was just not possible in their environment.
So I don't think that it's a good idea after all, and I'm pretty optimistic that our community is big enough to manage this on our own...
- michael
May 14, 2007
09:43
I understand the desire to keep it 'in-house' - though to be honest mailman lacks the usability and searchability of other newer systems - It just isn't friendly or intuitive as a first time user.
My vote is to use the best tool for the job. If the job is encourage public discussion and participation, I would vote for a more up-to-date system that encourages more people to join the community - and one that doesn't eat precious developer time reinventing the wheel.
Sudara
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Maybe now would be a good time to make a move to another system that provides lower maintenance, high availability and high usability.
I'm thinking along the lines of Google Groups, who also provide a migration path - you can 'manage' a remote mailing list to help ease the transition.
I'm willing to help with a migration if we step into this direction - I think it would make life easier for a large number of Typo3 users and reduce unhelpful things like Google indexing broken archive links.