Proposal on mailing list changes

[Pasi Lallinaho]

Hello,

For a more complete history on the issue, refer to the discussion on 
organizing mailing lists [1].

THE PROPOSAL, with arguments

After I've talked with many team members, most of us tend to think we 
have enough lists already. Most would prefer to simply increase the 
quality and appropriateness on the development list as well as keep the 
traffic on a desirable level instead of creating a new list. In 
addition, continuing with the same lists keeps the archives in one place.

While it can be a bit laborious at the beginning, I think the best way 
to increase the aforementioned attributes for the development list is to 
enable the moderation flag for all current and new subscribers, 
excluding Xubuntu team members. Setting the moderation flag instead of 
limiting subscriptions also makes the list more accessible for people 
and helps us keep the transparency at a reasonable level.

Practically this means all email from non-team members will have to be 
manually moderated and approved or declined as appropriate.

We should correspond with every person who sends an inappropriate 
(non-spam) mail to the list discussing the reasons and the appropriate 
action for them. This can be done by editing the automatic "declined 
email" reply template and using the equivalent action instead of 
discarding all inappropriate emails.

We have recently grown the moderator team on both of our lists, so the 
additional workload shouldn't cause excessive burden to any individual 
moderator. As long as we communicate the change clearly and have the 
patience to keep moderating and corresponding, I believe the amount of 
inappropriate mails will slowly start to decrease.

Moreover, when other people not in the team have proven they have been 
sending appropriate mails to the list, we can disable their moderation 
flag, which further decreases the amount of mail to moderate. Naturally, 
we can also disable the moderation flag for other known and trusted 
developers to the list as needed.

THE SUMMARY

1) Keep the lists we have now
2) Enable the moderation flag for all current and new subscribers, 
excluding the Xubuntu team
3) Correspond with senders as needed via the mailman Decline feature
4) Disable the moderation flag for other trusted senders and developers

THE DISCUSSION

Go ahead.

Cheers,
Pasi

[1] https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/xubuntu-devel/2014-April/010088.html

-- 
Pasi Lallinaho (knome)                      » http://open.knome.fi/
Leader of Shimmer Project and Xubuntu       » http://shimmerproject.org/
Graphic artist, webdesigner, Ubuntu member  » http://xubuntu.org/