[gnu.org #1267429] Re: lists that drop nonmember mail [was gnu-misc-discuss broken?]

[Ian Kelling via RT]

On Tue Jan 23 18:56:19 2018, karl wrote:
> Hi Ian,
> 
>     Anyone on this mailman list. What do you think should be done about
>     this issue?
> 
> -- For those lists which use listhelper:
> 
> Option 1: just setting generic_nonmember_action to hold should be ok
> technically. I doubt many list owners will complain, or even notice,
> though some surely will.
> 
> Of course it would be polite to write to the list owners saying that it
> has been done, but that's a lot of work.
> 
> Option 2: even more work: write to the list owners in advance of doing
> anything, and ask them if they don't mind us changing it.  (I would not
> bother to ask *them* to change it -- that's a 98% sure recipe for
> inaction, in my experience.)
> 
> -- For lists which don't use listhelper: we shouldn't just switch it to
> hold since nothing will be looking at the incoming msgs.  GNU packages
> really should not be discarding nonmember posts (it's in the coding
> standards/maintainer information); of course we could (offer to)
> (re)instate listhelper for the lists.  But for nongnu packages, I guess
> it's legitimately up to the list owners.
> 
> Just contacting the list owners at all is nontrivial, as the listed
> addresses in mailman are often stale.
> 
> I contacted list owners about this and other issues for years, until I
> just got tired of it and needed to spend my time doing other things.  So
> I can't volunteer to be the one to push this through, sorry.
> 
> Of course, another option (the most efficient one :) is to do nothing.
> The list situation never has been perfect, and never will be perfect, so
> we could just accept that other things have higher priority and let it go.
> It's up to you, really ...
> 
> 
> This seems like a good time to mention two of the scripts in ~list/bin
> on lists: dumpallconf and lists2do. dumpallconf dumps all the mailman
> list configurations into /home/list/tmp/dumpallconf. I run it
> irregularly, maybe once a month. (It takes hours to run.)
> 
> lists2do reads that output, among other things, and tries to report on
> various problems in the configurations, including
> generic_nonmember_action being anything but hold. The output is in
> /home/list/tmp/2do.out, and it starts like this:
> 
> 443 linphone-developers false     
> 261 www-zh-cn-hackers false     
> 185 gmediaserver-devel false     
> ..
> 
> That number is the size of the hold queue, and the "false" means
> listhelper is not enable. The hold queues get that huge because those
> list owners either explicitly told us they don't want listhelper, or
> because they are for non-English lists, which listhelper cannot handle
> well. And in either case, obviously the list owners are not taking care
> of the incoming messages. 
> 
> There are various things that could be done, starting with talking to
> the list owners, but again, there's never enough time to do everything ...
> 
> Best,
> Karl
> 
> 


Thanks for the insights! There were only 4 gnu lists that are actually
active with this setting, none using listhelper. I added a warning the
description and contacted the list owners to let them know and ask them
to consider using listhelper and changing the setting.

The rest were either dead, or already clearly didn't accept postings. I
updated the dead ones descrioptoins with warnings that they don't accept 
nonmember
posts.


-- 
Ian Kelling | Senior Systems Administrator, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: B125 F60B 7B28 7FF6 A2B7 DF8F 170A F0E2 9542 95DF
https://fsf.org | https://gnu.org