We have better alternatives. The Django forum in particular, is more active and offers users and moderators better options to manage conversations. “Like” reactions, suggestions of similar topics when starting a post, ability to subscribe to categories – etc.
The mailing lists have way too much visibility for their comparative usefulness. For example on the djangoproject.com homepage.
When I say “officially retiring” – this is a reflection on it being effectively already retired:
Independent contributors constantly redirecting discussions towards the forum as a better place to have active discussions.
Fellows also redirecting discussions elsewhere.
The DSF board no longer doing any comms on either django-users or django-developers. We have much better tools on the forum, social media, Reddit, etc.
The DSF has gone through the same process for the dsf-members private mailing list, which still exists but is very much legacy. That’s working pretty well.
Going ahead with this would make it possible for us to make the other options that much more visible, thereby improving the experience for folks who are new to Django as users or as contributors.
People have complained a really long time about the bad moderation UI on Google groups and they are totally right.
Disclaimer: I have always preferred mailing lists to forums, but have slowly been changing my mind in the last months. Discourse is a great piece of software.
If it’s possible to stop new posts but allow responses to existing posts (so someone could post a link to the migrated discussion/ticket/PR), that would be ideal.
I can confirm that I point folks to the forum currently
I do have a question about this as a moderator here.
There are a couple types of conversations that occur in the groups that have previously been squelched here. (Job-related posts being the most common.)
The previous position here has been that there are a sufficient number of places elsewhere to post available jobs or to look for positions - that this forum didn’t need to be home for those posts.
As a moderator on the Discord, we do allow job posts in the relevant channel and require a URL to the job posting itself. We also don’t allow posts for those looking for a job as these tend to me spam from outsiders and not those engaged in the community.
At a higher level, I have an early draft on my computer for a ‘Community’ Working Group to help coordinate processes across the platforms the community uses.
Great! Let’s see what other people who land on this thread think, and then I’ll proceed with creating tickets for the website and Django? Maybe draft a phased plan from current state to “not promoted”, “restricted posting”, “archive”.
Re stopping new posts and allowing responses, I don’t think Google Groups supports this but we can check. It does support only allowing specific people to post, so I suppose we could do something where Django technical teams / DSF members / a select few retain their posting permissions. Depending on the capabilities of the tool.
I agree - the forum is a far easier place to manage a lot of feedback and discussion, especially in terms of moderation and categorisation, and I think easier to read and search through as well (a bunch of our inbound traffic already comes from people searching for Django problems).
@andrewgodwin@nessita as forum admins, would either of you be ok to update the descriptions of the forum’s Using Django and Django Internals categories to remove the references to the mailing lists?
Is there anywhere else we should be updating?
The next steps I think will be the gradual shutting down of the lists. I’ve not done a lot of planning there but here are the steps I think could make sense:
Email on the list to explain the current status and upcoming changes
Stop allowing people to join the lists (“Who can join group”: “Invited users only”)
Restrict posting (“Who can post”: “Group managers”)
Unfortunately it doesn’t seem possible to use a custom role for “Who can post”, but there are a few options in Google Groups settings that might be possible for us to leverage.
Do we have anyone here would be interested to take on all of the above? The first step will be finding the group’s current owners and managers.
For anyone else following along, make sure to check out the Online Community WG proposal by @nanorepublica, which has a lot of promising ideas about our management of online platforms.
They’re certainly useful! Just there are better options these days for the majority of people.
I’ve started a planning doc to take this further. Feedback very welcome. If you think specific points of the plan need adjustment or if you want to pick up any specific task that doesn’t have a ticket please comment: [public] django-users & django-developers retirement planning.
Thanks for moving this forward! I can answer a few questions –
Owners of django-users: Adrian, Andrew, Jacob (2 emails), myself
Owners of django-developers: Adrian (2 emails), Jacob (2 emails), myself
Managers of django-users: Markus Holtermann, Russell Keith-Magee, Antoni Aloy
Managers of django-developers: Markus Holtermann, Russell Keith-Magee
I don’t see any ability to allow posting on existing conversations while preventing new conversations. We could turn on “moderate all messages” and (try to) do that manually, though if that ends up being a lot of traffic that might be a bit too much to handle.
There is an ability to set up a rejected message notification, which I think would be useful to direct folk to the forum instead of the mailing lists.
I think the rejected message notification sounds like a good call. Having y’all monitor incoming messages seems like a lot of work to put on very few shoulders, for very little gain. If the message rejection points at the forum and invites the person to start a new thread while linking the past discussion, I feel like that’s good enough.
Just there are better options these days for the majority of people.