Am 15.11.18 um 22:43 schrieb Allin Cottrell:
For over 12 years Wake Forest University has hosted the gretl-devel
and gretl-users lists, using GNU Mailman. I'm now told that they're
going to discontinue Mailman support; we have about 6 weeks to run
before they pull the plug.
Does that include Mailman version 3? AFAIK the gretl lists run on
Mailman 2, and version 3 was released in 2015.
Their proposed alternative is Google Groups (GG), and they've set
up
groups to shadow gretl-devel, gretl-users and gretl-announce.
I'd be pretty strongly against moving to Google. As we all know, we pay
those "free" offerings with our data. Yes it's convenient, but it would
be great if those with university ties and affiliations could leverage
those resources for this open-source project. We would shut out people
who choose not to have a Google account.
So we could migrate to GG with (I hope) little difficulty. But maybe
we want to consider alternatives.
In the past Jack offered to have mailing lists hosted at his Uni. BTW,
I've read that Mailman 3 also offers a forum-like interface (in addition
to, not replacing the standard mail interface, AFAIK). I have no
personal experience, however, at least not consciously.
I have very little experience with GG so I don't have a sense of
how
good a replacement they would provide. One alternative would be to use
the Sourceforge mailing list apparatus, but I wouldn't favour that; I
like many things about SF but IMO their mailing list interface really
sucks. And then we've talked about moving to a "forum" approach in the
past; I guess that should be considered too. Personally I think a
forum of some sort might be a good replacement for the current
gretl-users, but I have a strong preference for a "mailing list"
format for devel purposes.
I agree that splitting up the platforms for users and devel could make
sense. Perhaps the easiest route for the users list would indeed be to
replace it with a SF forum (plus a very visible link to the old list
archives). I could probably manage such a users' forum on SF in a
similar way as the trackers: That means, organizing the number and range
of subforums and do a minimal amount of moderation (which we all should
do, however).
Given that I predict that such a forum would see more traffic than the
current users list I cannot commit to contributing to all
questions/threads there. (This should be obvious, but better be explicit
about it.)
cheers,
sven