[TYPES] [meta] URL rewriting notice

[Ralf Jung]

Hi all,

> We may have to migrate to a different mailing-list host in the coming
> months. (Only a dozen of people gave their opinion in August 2021, but
> those that did were generally in support of changing mailing-list provider
> to avoid the unpleasant practice of URL filtering. I have not acted on
> these suggestions, partly out of personal laziness, but also because I
> worry that the transition would be fairly disruptive for list members.)
> My own employer (INRIA, in France) has a mailing-list service that could
> probably be used. If you have recommendations -- if your university insists
> on doing the world a favor by hosting academic mailing lists -- now may be
> a good time to send them to me. I will also consult with past moderators
> for guidance.

This may be a bit far out there, but another potential alternative to consider 
is to use Discourse. Discourse is a forum software with a mailing list mode, 
combining the best of web-based forums and mail-based lists. In mailing list 
mode it behaves basically like a mailing list, but if you use it as a forum then 
you only subscribe to topics you are interested in (plus hourly/daily/weekly 
summaries of new topics; you can also subscribe to everything in a "category"). 
Being a forum it also has much better search than any mailing list I have seen, 
and one can very easily reply to topics that were created before one joined, or 
read a thread of discussion later.

For higher-traffic lists, I think Discourse is clearly better (and e.g. LLVM 
recently switched their development mailing list to discourse; Rust is also 
using Discourse rather than a mailing list).
TYPES is very low-traffic though, so the point is much less clear. OTOH I think 
this might help mitigate some of the concerns people have with occasional spikes 
of discussion like we had recently, where IIRC one concern was that people 
generally expect this to be low-traffic.

Kind regards,
Ralf

> 
> Listly yours, cheers
> 
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 3:55 PM Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
>> Dear types-announce list,
>>
>> UPenn, who has been generously hosting this mailing-list (and types-list)
>> since 2006, has just setup an email-processing system that rewrites URLs
>> included in all email received by the university, including their
>> mailing-list services, "protecting" them by turning them into a reference
>> to a third-party service (ProofPoint / urldefense) that should redirect to
>> the intended URL after some unknown security-inspired procedures have been
>> applied -- or block access because someone's filter is wrong.
>>
>> We are in touch with the administrators to try to disable this
>> transformation, but in the meantime I decided to keep forwarding the emails
>> as usual to avoid disrupting the flow of announcements. Apologies in
>> advance for the strange, modified URLs, and the inconvenience it may cause
>> (mailing-list email being marked as spam due to failed DKIM verification,
>> etc.).
>>
>> Best
>>

-- 
Website: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://ralfj.de/research__;!!IBzWLUs!RXKu6AzQyKnk0mm4ucqeheRdTrOm1nMYErzL9mXosBkKZWy38pcogdrZtMBWV4Fi4RC2iSRJCekxCpdFaOytpWpl5Q$