On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 9:25 PM, Gaelan Steele <[email protected]> wrote: > I’m thinking maybe we should migrate to Google Groups at some point, because > GG is quite unlikely to go down, and even if it gets Reader’d, they will > almost certainly provide a data download. Groups also has a nicer UI than > Mailman/The List Archive.
I'm going to let other people address this because I'm biased as Distributor, but a few points: - Google Groups' UI is fancy, and actually nice when it works; sometimes it does not work. For example, the mobile version has a bunch of issues, while the desktop version is slow on mobile. However, Mailman's archiver isn't so great either. It's especially bad for casual navigation as it is now because threads are often split between multiple mailing lists, while the archive can only show one at a time. I'm considering trying to upgrade to Mailman 3, maybe when 3.1 is out, and that has HyperKitty as the archiver, which is fancier... but pretty badly designed, so arguably even worse. - There would be less flexibility. For example, it would be difficult to maintain the three-list system at all due to the lack of custom reply-to (I just checked, but could be wrong); even if that weren't an issue, while here I could (and would like to) improve things by adding quick ways to subscribe to all three and maybe merging the archives or something, this wouldn't be possible with Google Groups. Of course, we could switch to some other way of distinguishing the different types of post, such as by subject line, by marking the start of the body, or not at all. They all have disadvantages, but some have advantages, especially 'not seeming ridiculously baroque to new players'. Actually, the current system is kind of broken anyway, because agora-business will not stick another prefix on 'DIS: Re: BUS: Foo', so you can't count on business messages starting with BUS. I set it up that way (with custom code) when I inherited the mailing list a few years ago with the goal of precisely matching the old behavior; would be an easy fix, but if nobody has complained so far, maybe it's not that important? - Google Groups is no public mbox export; you have to crawl. Of course someone could maintain one, but this is an added annoyance. - I'm actually unsure which of my willingness to maintain a mailing list indefinitely, and Google's to keep Groups going, is more likely to expire first.
