BitFolk's mailing lists have migrated to Mailman 3

Hi, == TL;DR: == The BitFolk mailing lists changed address, but important stuff got copied over. You don't need to do anything. The new list archives are at: https://mailman.bitfolk.com/mailman/hyperkitty/ and if you DO want to change any of your settings the main interface is at: https://mailman.bitfolk.com/mailman/postorius/lists/ But you'll have to do a Mailman password reset before you can log in to it and change settings. You can stop reading now unless you are particularly interested in the details. == What == BitFolk's announce@ and users@ mailing lists which used to be at lists.bitfolk.com have now been migrated to <listname>(a)mailman.bitfolk.comlk.com, which is Mailman 3. == Why == The VM which runs lists.bitfolk.com needs to be upgraded. It runs Mailman 2, which is a strictly Python 2 application. Python 2 was EOL in 2020 sometime and is not available in newer releases of Debian, and so neither is Mailman 2. An upgrade will leave Mailman 2 non-functional. Running Mailman 3, which is a complete rewrite, is a major undertaking that I have little experience of and I'm not entirely happy about it. However, unless we either want to outsource the mailing lists to another provider or switch to something like Discourse¹, it seems to be still the best option. While it may have been possible to install Python 2 and Mailman 2 from source on an otherwise upgraded host, that is a lot of work for what seems like a dead end. == Your subscriptions == All subscribed addresses have been copied over, which is why you are seeing this email. You don't need to do anything, but if you do want to adjust your settings you'll need to do a password reset in Mailman as your passwords have not been copied over. The web interface for the lists is at: https://mailman.bitfolk.com/mailman/postorius/lists/ In the footer of messages to the "users" list it will have a link and tell you which address you are subscribed with. The "announce" list does not have a footer so if you're unsure what your subscribed address is there you'll need to look at the email headers. == Functional changes == === Headers === I'm tired of list postings being rejected or going to spam folders. We can't keep sending emails on your behalf, i.e. with a From: address that is yours, because that breaks DKIM. So over on the "users" list all posts will appear to come from: From: Your Name via BitFolk Users <users(a)mailman.bitfolk.com> Cc: Your Name <you(a)example.com> The Cc header is so that people can still contact you off-list if they want. Obviously the List-Id: headers have changed so if you're filtering email based upon those you will need to update your filters. Sorry about that. === Reply-To: added, no more "users-replyto" === We used to have a separate mailing list "users-replyto" which got all the same emails as the "users" list, but added: Reply-To: users(a)lists.bitfolk.com to them for people who preferred to explicitly have replies directed back to the list. The main "users" list is going to have an explicit Reply-To: added now, making "users-replyto" redundant. Anyone who was subscribed to "users-replyto" has been added to "users". The reason for this is that I got feedback that despite it being a long held belief that forcing Reply-To: is bad², these days most people do prefer it. I'm happy to revisit that decision if people don't like it, but the "users-replyto" hack won't be coming back. === List addresses === Obviously the list addresses have both changed from @lists.bitfolk.com to @mailman.bitfolk.com. This was necessary so that the older Mailman could continue working while the new one was set up. No doubt through muscle memory and address books the occasional email will still end up being sent to whatever(a)lists.bitfolk.com. These emails are being redirected to the correct place and I anticipate keeping that redirection in place forever. === List archives === The public archives of the "announce" and "users" lists have been imported into Mailman3's archiver, HyperKitty, at: https://mailman.bitfolk.com/mailman/hyperkitty/ I tried to port over the existing Lurker archives but I just couldn't get it to work. Lurker is mostly undocumented and hasn't seen any development since 2007. This unfortunately means that all the old archive links that are out there in previous emails and in the wiki, etc. will break if and when I turn off Lurker on the old host. I hope to be able to transplant a static copy of https://lists.bitfolk.com/lurker/ over to https://mailman.bitfolk.com/lurker/ so that old links will still work, with automatic redirection. There doesn't appear to be any way to map an individual Lurker message link to a HyperKitty link, sadly. The new HyperKitty archives are fully searchable, so if you do happen to see a Lurker link in a wiki article please do feel free to find the same message in HyperKitty and update the article. If you find it in some other place that you can't edit please do just let me know and I'll update it. The same goes for any other references to lists.bitfolk.com. == Let us know about any issues or suggestions for the lists == As I say I'm not very experienced in running Mailman 3 so it's possibly it might break or be misconfigured in some way that I haven't yet found. So if you spot anything that you think looks broken, please do let us know. Also if you have suggestions for how it might work differently or look differently, I am interested to hear and try to implement, though I cannot promise that it is possible. Certainly I am not in love with the default appearance of the HyperKitty archives or the colour scheme of Mailman 3's web interface in general, and it may be possible to improve those. Thanks, Andy ¹ Discourse: https://www.discourse.org/ ² https://marc.merlins.org/netrants/reply-to-harmful.html and its counter-argument https://marc.merlins.org/netrants/reply-to-useful.html Both of these are over 20 years old so I'm not sure how relevant they are (or that mailing lists are) for the modern Internet. It should also be noted that one of the objections to Reply-To: munging is that it can remove all information about where the author wants replies to go. In Mailman3's case, if you supply Reply-To: headers of your own then it adds them, so that objection doesn't hold. -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting