Future of the mailing lists

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1

I’ve started a discussion about the future of the mailing lists on sc-users: https://www.listarc.bham.ac.uk/lists/sc-users/msg69806.html

I’d like to keep the discussion in one place to keep it manageable, so please reply there.

2

hello,

not wanting to drag the conversation of what to do here, but maybe this is somewhat pertinent -

i could not for the life of me sign up for the mailing list. i tried a month or two ago, and received an error in response from majordomo. i tried a couple of email accounts from different providers (protonmail and gmail) to make sure it wasn’t something on my end! and i just tried again and received the same error.

i love mailing lists and was bummed when i couldn’t join. was happy to find this forum though a little while later.

i don’t know if you’ve gotten many (any) sign ups recently, but maybe this could be some of the winding down issue that was mentioned in one of the responses. that being said, i’m not sure if others have recently experienced the same error that i have.

boris

3

damnit. spoke to soon. i just tried one more time, i made the message plain text and that worked.

very strange because i just every other time i copied and pasted from the university of birmingham site, so whatever font it’s in, it was web friendly…

i’m on many mailing lists and have never had this issue before. anyway, still seems problematic to me… it almost made me think if i can’t even get on the mailing list, there’s no way i can actually learn to use this language for sound making.

4

I always get a security message about the sites certificate…

Even after pressing the go ahead / accept the risks, the page still refuses to load, deadweight…

This is the exact message if it helps:

Secure Connection Failed

  • The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified

  • Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

5

unable to load here as well Chrome Mac Catalina

6

Yes, plaintext seems to do the trick. The info page explains this. As I mentioned on list, the list hosting software is also a bit antiquated and causes problems like this amongst others. This may be another reason to consider moving, or winding them up. That issue should be addressed locally eventually, but there’s no clear timescale.

7

When I replied to the thread on sc-users, I thought that it would be the ideal if there was much continuity between the mailing-list and discourse. So I hijack this thread to think about this, I hope this is fine.

One argument for mailing-lists is that they allow you to work offline. How much of this can we emulate here?

  1. the mailing-list mode: is it continuous with the forum? Or are the posts “ugly”? How does it work with formatting and quoting conversations? (sorry, I haven’t been able to switch this mode on for myself)
  2. offline access: is there a way to pull the existing conversations from the forum to a local backup and update it continuously?
1 Like
8

When I replied to the thread on sc-users, I thought that it would be the ideal if there was much continuity between the mailing-list and discourse. So I hijack this thread to think about this, I hope this is fine.

One argument for mailing-lists is that they allow you to work offline. How much of this can we emulate here?

  1. the mailing-list mode: is it continuous with the forum? Or are the posts “ugly”? How does it work with formatting and quoting conversations? (sorry, I haven’t been able to switch this mode on for myself)
    Apart from an annoyingly large footer the posts look usable in plain
    text mode. I am not reading html email.
  2. offline access: is there a way to pull the existing conversations from the forum to a local backup and update it continuously?
    All emails that are received from the mailinglist/forum can form your
    local backup perhaps?

best, P

9

Interestingly your plain-text mail replies show inline in the quote here. That’s not really great…

10

Hello,

I just tried to reply to something here and was marked as a spammer.

I think it’s because the reply had a link to a gitlab project?

(Or at least deleting that link let the message go through, I’m not really sure why.)

In any case I’m told by the system that “the community feels [this] is an advertisement, something that is overly promotional in nature instead of being useful or relevant to the topic as expected.”

Not specifically a mailing list transition issue I guess, but the mailing list software (at least) wasn’t so mean!

Best,
Rohan

11

The issue was, too many posts with links to the same domain.

That’s a completely automated behavior (no human moderators flagged your messages). I have just overridden it and approved the posts.

hjh

12

excellent, thanks kindly - maybe if there’s an “allowed” list gitlab and github and perhaps any other obvious places could be added to it? - best, r

13

The text email source of @Peter’s reply prepends > to each line - so afaict the forum is interpreting this correctly? (e.g. > lines are quoted).

14

gitlab and github links are now whitelisted. Also, I made the “spam detection” for mass linking a little bit less sensitive. We’ve never really had problems with spam on the forum (probably we are way low traffic and esoteric to attract much), so I think this should be fine - and we can always adjust if we encounter problems in the future.

We’re running into a few of these issues for new users since we’re seeing an influx of people from the sc-users list joining, and the discourse has some protections that prevent someone from joining and immediately posting spam/big attachments/one word responses/etc as their first message. We can continue to adjust rules as needed.

15

Dear all,

Scott, your quote “The text email…” in your reply is sent between
lines of
quote=“muellmusik, post:9, topic:3736, full:true”
and
/quote
both in square brackets each, when read in mailing list mode and as
plain text email.

Apart from mail user agent’s not displaying this properly and without
syntax colorzing, it garbles the message.

Furthermore, is there any way to disable the lengthy email footer that
comes with each and every email? Imagine all forum posts having them
added…

thank you all for your help,
P

16

The markdown (square brackets) is part of my original post, so that’s why it’s probably in the plain text version. I guess it would be a nice discourse feature if it somehow transformed this particular markdown into something more like “plain text email” formatting, e.g. > - it’s probably worth submitting a discourse feature request for this.

The mail footer has (1) a perma-link to the original topic, (2) a legal notification about archiving replies, and (3) a sentence about why you’re receiving the email / how to unsubscribe.

(1) seems useful and I can imagine removing it would be quite confusing for navigating a long history of emails from the list. (2) is a legal requirement, (3) is good etiquette and probably a legal requirement in many places.

17

Dear Scott,

The markdown (square brackets) is part of my original post, so that’s why it’s probably in the plain text version. I guess it would be a nice discourse feature if it somehow transformed this particular markdown into something more like “plain text email” formatting, e.g. > - it’s probably worth submitting a discourse feature request for this.
I would rather think of this as a required feature not a feature for
technology that claims to be a drop-in replacement for mailing lists.

I am greatful for all your support and attempts to make mailing list
mode work, but feel that the situation as it is right now has many
disadvantages over the old list still.

The mail footer has (1) a perma-link to the original topic, (2) a legal notification about archiving replies, and (3) a sentence about why you’re receiving the email / how to unsubscribe.

(1) seems useful and I can imagine removing it would be quite confusing for navigating a long history of emails from the list. (2) is a legal requirement, (3) is good etiquette and probably a legal requirement in many places.
Understood. I think of 1 as being useless to me as I am reading postings
via email because I don’t want to visit an URL from a forum.
In which legislation is 2 required for each and every message? Couldn’t
this be handled at sign-up?

Thanks again for your help in making mailing list mode more accessible,
possibly also to visually impaired users.

Peter

Visit Topic Future of the mailing lists - #16 by scztt or
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18

Sorry you’re running into issues! I hope you can find a workflow that you’re happy with - the forum software is quite configurable, and I’m happy to make tweaks where possible, if they can improve the experience for list members, mailing list mode users or otherwise.

19

Hi,

Sorry you’re running into issues! I hope you can find a workflow that you’re happy with - the forum software is quite configurable, and I’m happy to make tweaks where possible, if they can improve the experience for list members, mailing list mode users or otherwise.
Test1

Test2

Reading my last posting as it is rendered on the forum I see that the
forum software gets quoting wrong. The first line of my replies got
included in the quoted text. I am testing this here with the two lines
above.

P

20

The forum interprets text as Markdown (specifically, following the common-mark specification). This should more or less match how the forum interprets markdown (including blockquotes): https://markdown-it.github.io/

Specifically: blockquotes are allowed to have single newlines, and only double-newlines signal that the block is over.

If you’re interacting with posts via plaintext mailing list mode, it’s good to know the basics of markdown because it ensures that your mails will be displayed in a reasonable way for all forum users - those using both plaintext and html emails, and those using the web interface (with all the associated details, e.g. css, screen readers, etc).