On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 11:44 AM, TerryE <[email protected]> wrote: > On 03/08/11 16:15, Rob Weir wrote: >> >> On Wed, Aug 3, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Terry Ellison<[email protected]> >> wrote: >>> >>> On 03/08/11 15:14, Rob Weir wrote: >>>> >>>> A specific question then that should not require diverting your >>>> current efforts. Is there a announcement list or some other mechanism >>>> to send an email to every registered wiki user? >>> >>> At a technical level, it's simple to run a query dumping all of the mail >>> addresses of contributors to the wiki. I've just done a few on my local >>> VM >>> which has a snapshot of the prod wiki as at Thursday/Fri night IIRC. >>> >>> * There are 34,969 registered users. Of which >>> * 3,675 have made contributions. There is no need to contact those >>> who haven't >>> * 3,623 have registered email addresses and have made 182,677 >>> contributions >>> * 52 have no registered email addresses and have made 153 >>> contributions (prob dating back to the early days when email >>> registration and confirmation wasn't mandatory >>> >>> It is trivial to dump this list of user / email addr / post count. >>> >>> However giving this to Apache and the project making use of it is a more >>> complex issue. The server is current located in Oracle's Hamburg >>> facility >>> under German / EU legislation. We have data protection legislation and >>> Anti-Spam guidelines / legislation to bear in mind here. Moving email >>> addresses across national and organisational boundary might trigger >>> these. >>> Also one can't send out mailshot emails in the EU unless the recipients >>> have first agreed in principle to accept these. >>> >>> What I can do is to provide this data to Andrew via the internal Oracle >>> email, and let him figure out the legal / compliance issues and terms of >>> use >>> before him making it available to the project. Not my call. >>> >> Good enough. Thanks. I was hoping that there would be some community >> email list that everyone was already signed up on. Maybe if not at >> the wiki system level, then at the OpenOffice.org level? If there is >> a master announce list that everyone is already on, then we'd be >> golden. >> > (Some) developers for some arcane reason seem to like DLs. AFAIK, others > and the majority of users hate them and regard them as spam, preferring less > invasive pull technologies such as forums and subscription services such as > gmane. For example, I routinely work 6 forums and 4 wikis, plus a dozen > gname lists. This is the only SMTP DL that I am on. Announce Lists just > don't work in this end-user world. >
Good point. I've seen Wikipedia handle this type of broadcast communication by injecting content into every page, via a header template or whatever. You see that for their fund raising campaigns or surveys, for example. We might be able to do something like that and get the message out.
