Proposal: retiring django-users and django-developers mailing lists

Django Internals
1

What do people think of officially retiring the django-users and django-developers mailing lists / Google Groups?

My main two reasons are:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

15 Likes
2

I think it’s a great idea. It’s time.

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.

1 Like
3

+1 I was going to make this proposal myself at some point!

4

Yes, +1. It’s time.

(We’re just doing folks a disservice pointing them to the Google Groups now)

5

+1

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

2 Likes
6

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.

Is there any intent for this to change?

1 Like
7

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.

4 Likes
8

+1, let’s do it.

If we do this, can we add a time limit of, say, 6 months? There’s always someone who wants to revive a years-old discussion…

2 Likes
9

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.

10

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).

11

Yup, strong agree, it’s time.

12

Good call. +1 for me.

13

+1

I’m also in favor, I made this proposal soon after I started as a Fellow so I really would like to see this pursued.

14

Took a while but I got there:

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:

  1. Email on the list to explain the current status and upcoming changes
  2. Stop allowing people to join the lists (“Who can join group”: “Invited users only”)
  3. 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.

1 Like
15

+1

I never knew they existed to start with (most evidence of lack of usefulness)

16

They’re certainly useful! :slight_smile: 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.

17

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.

4 Likes
18

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.

4 Likes
19

+1 on retiring the mailing lists. The forum has indeed become a much better platform for discussions - better moderation, search functionality and overall interaction. Most active contributors have already moved here.

Makes sense to keep the archives accessible for historical value, but new discussions are better suited here.

1 Like
20

Hi all, I see people have made good progress on de-listing the mailing lists from the various places they’re listed! As far as I can tell it’s all done for the website, Trac, and Django DEPs. Changes are still under way for the Django docs.

The next steps I proposed is “gradual shutting down”. Here’s a more detailed plan I arrived at based on reviewing Google Groups capabilities – @kmtracey @jacobian as our mailing list owners in this thread, could you let us know what you think of this plan? I’m happy to put it in action if you give me the relevant access, or otherwise if you’re ok to proceed yourselves.

Unfortunately it seems the only option to send a personalized reply message is manual (make all content moderated and manually reject). So I’ve looked for other ways to restrict posting.

First step

  1. Set “Who can join group” to “Invited users only” to prevent new sign-ups
  2. Set “Who can post” to “Group members”
  3. Turn off “Allow email posting”, and make sure “Allow web posting” is on
  4. Message the list with the following:

Subject: :rotating_light:Moving discussions to the forum

Hi, we’ve decided to officially move conversations from this mailing list to the Django Forum. The mailing list is now closed to new members, and only allows posting via the Google Groups web interface to encourage people to stop posting here – while still making it possible to do so if needed.

We will further restrict posting in the future, with the list eventually becoming a read-only archive. We have no plans to delete it, there are a lot important conversations here that our users and contributors often refer to.

This list has been invaluable to the Django community in the past, but these days it seems most conversations have moved on to other places, so the list only increases fragmentation and moderation burden in our community. Please consider joining the Django forum and keeping discussions going there, or take a look at our Django Community page to find other online spaces.

Thank you!
Name, on behalf of the Django Software Foundation

For reference, disallowing email posting will result in the following message when emailing the group:

Message blocked
Your message to the-group-name@googlegroups.com has been blocked. See technical details below for more information.
The group the-group-name@googlegroups.com does not allow posting through email.

Second step

Moving from “allow web posting for group members”, step two is – restrict all posting to Managers only. With the idea that trusted contributors can be added as Managers as needed if they wanted to signpost specific conversations towards the forum.

With that in place, the message users would receive is more cryptic but better than nothing:

We’re writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (dsf-test-group) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group. A few more details on why you weren’t able to post:

  • You might have spelled or formatted the group name incorrectly.
  • The owner of the group may have removed this group.
  • You may need to join the group before receiving permission to post.
  • This group may not be open to posting.

And I think that might be it?

2 Likes