I’ll tell you why things are set up this way and what we can do about it.
For many years, proposed changes to the CF Conventions were described and discussed in a Trac issue tracker hosted at LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California). This traffic was rather light, and all was copied to a mailing list, cf-metadata, hosted at LLNL. The mailing list membership is identical to another cf-metadata list hosted at NCAR. The reason for having two mailing lists was that if anyone didn’t want the Trac messages, he could ask to be deleted from cf-metadata at LLNL, and still get the other cf-metadata messages. In practice, that never happened. More recently, a consensus developed in the community that we should move from Trac to the Github issue tracker, and move implementation of document changes from one person (me) to the whole community, again through Github. We did so, in such a way as to keep the same mailing list connections as before. Some people knew at the time that there was a danger that these changes would increase traffic. Not only are proposed changes discussed as before, but with the new system we get implementation messages (such as “merged into master”). So now that high-traffic issue has cropped up! What can we do? The simplest is to stop the transmission from Github to the mailing list. If only a few people are bothered, I can take them off the LLNL list. I can make either of those changes in a few minutes, once we have a community consensus about what to do. More complicated would be to send some messages but not others to the mailing list. I might be able to do that, depending what criteria we need for choosing messages. - Jeff Painter From: <[email protected]> on behalf of Chris Barker <[email protected]> Date: Wednesday, November 7, 2018 at 9:26 AM To: Janine Aquino <[email protected]> Cc: Chris Barker - NOAA Federal <[email protected]>, Martin Juckes - UKRI STFC <[email protected]>, Erik Quaeghebeur <[email protected]>, Jim Biard <[email protected]>, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Please stop sending Github messages to the ML On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 8:50 AM, Janine Aquino <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: I am not convinced that is the source of the problem. -- I have never personally commented on this issue. no one thinks you did -- but somehow "cf-metadata-list" did comment on the issue. And there does appear to be such a user: https://github.com/cf-metadata-list (Joined gitHub Oct 7, 2017) I suspect that the cf-metadata-list user was created so that we could have gitHub issues mirrored to the list. > I have been receiving GitHub messages via the list for months This particular issue has been very active, but it is NOT months old. And the gitHub account has not been all that active before that. So I think that the list is purposely notified when new issues are created, etc. So I _think_ that what happened was: The CF gitHub account is set up to email the list (via the gitHub cf-metadata-list user) in certain circumstances -- I hope that's issue creation (and maybe PR creation), but not all comments. But the way the gitHub email linking works, when gitHub sends an email about an issue (usually to a regular gitHub user), when they respond to that email, their response is posted as a comment on that issue. This is a nice feature, as it allows users to participate in discussion completely through email. But it also means that if someone responds to an email that was sent to the list by gitHub, then gitHub thinks the list itself responded, so it posts the mesage as a comment (good), but then that user is now added to the "wants to be notified of new comments" list, and presto -- a lo tof discussion spamming the list. To solve the problem at hand, someone needs to log in to gitHub as the cf-metadata-list user and take themselves off the I want to follow this issue list. _maybe_ the issue creator (Jim in this case) can do that, but I suspect not. So who knows the password of the cf-metadata-list user ?? In the future, I have no idea how to maintain a bridge to the list without risking this happening again. But maybe there is a way to set that user up to receive emails, but not be able to post via email -- I have no idea. I am currently trying to unsubscribe from the cf-metadata list, but so far no luck. have you tried this page? http://mailman.cgd.ucar.edu/mailman/listinfo/cf-metadata -CHB ----------- Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
