Mailing list maintenance for council-discuss?

Hi, I wanted to pitch some setting changes for the lists.fp.o mailing list we recently moved away from.

One of the annoying parts of being a mailing list admin means you still get all of the spam emails in your inbox, unless you deliberately filter those out somewhere else (which is hard to not also discard legitimate email). So, instead, I propose we make the migration to our new snazzy Discourse forum more explicit.

When we moved the CommOps mailing list to Discourse back in 2018, I changed a few settings to make the migration more seamless and to save my email inbox from the onslaught of never-ending spam. I outline the changes I made to CommOps below, in the hope that we could do something similar for council-discuss.

Thoughts? @mattdm @bcotton @riecatnor @bookwar @x3mboy @spot @dcantrell @asamalik

List Identity

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/council-discuss.lists.fedoraproject.org/settings/list_identity

Note I changed the Description, Information, and Display Name. I think Display Name is probably most important, because Hyperkitty shows that name all over the interface.

Automatic Responses

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/council-discuss.lists.fedoraproject.org/settings/automatic_responses

This menu is where you can PERMANENTLY SILENCE THE SPAM. For CommOps, I took an aggressive configuration to always reject and discard messages sent to -request and -owner. I also added an automatic response that is always sent after every reply to these aliases.

The sample text I used in the auto-response replies is below for copy-pasta simplicity.

* * * * * COMMOPS MAILING LIST IS NOW RETIRED * * * * *

Did you know? CommOps is retiring our mailing list and moving to discussion.fedoraproject.org. You can sign in with your Fedora Project account – no additional accounts are required. Please post your topic on Discourse to ensure you receive a response to your message:

#commops-team topics

Also, note that I changed the Autoresponse grace period to 0d, so an email auto-response is sent every time someone mails any of the old mailing list addresses. You may or may not find this useful.

Message Acceptance

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/council-discuss.lists.fedoraproject.org/settings/message_acceptance

This is an extra step, which may or may not be necessary, to block already-subscribed members from posting to the list. It should use the text filled in the previous section as the rejection message.

Subscription Policy

https://lists.fedoraproject.org/admin/lists/council-discuss.lists.fedoraproject.org/settings/subscription_policy

This step prevents new members from subscribing to the list. (Not really, they can still subscribe but they will be stuck in moderation instead.)

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This sounds good. I wonder if there is something at the mailman level where the list got just archived and help to avoid the need to make this changes manually.

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Yeah I think these sound like good things to do. I’ll implement as I get a chance.

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This is done. Thanks @jflory7

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