[TYPES] [meta] URL rewriting notice

[Gabriel Scherer]

Thanks everyone for the feedback,

The UPenn admins have fixed something in the way they implement URL
rewriting, and I hope that the "marked as SPAM or bounced" inconveniences
that several of you have have experienced should go away. Please let me
know (off-list) if you are affected again. (Also: thanks to Benjamin Pierce
for his help talking with the UPenn people.)

Thanks for the feedback on Discourse. Currently we have a mailing-list that
is the same as existed twenty years ago, and as an alternative the Zulip
that is modern, shiny, has an application for smartphones, etc. Some people
prefer the mailing-list (in jest one would say "senior members of our
community"), some the Zulip. I would be hesitant of just adding a third
place, and I don't know whether Discourse should be considered as a
replacement for the mailing-list, or Zulip, or both.
Discourse is a nice tool, but I don't know that it would work as well as
the mailing-list in the role of "reliable old tool". For example: we have
mailing-list archives from 2003 onward in a single place (and older
archives one URL away), how many web forums have 20 years of archives?
Conversely, I can see several ways in which it improves over Zulip (better
searchability, mature moderation tools), but it loses in terms of
immediateness / "instant chat" feeling -- it looks like the Coq Discourse
is seeing much lower volume than the Coq Zulip, perhaps for these subtle
fuzzy reasons. (On the other hand, the experience of the OCaml community
migrating from a mailing-list to Discourse was fairly positive.)
Long story short: nothing that is not a mailing-list is a clear improvement
over a mailing-list for scholarly discussions, so my intuition is to be
conservative and keep the mailing-list working while we can. We can
reconsider in the future if there is clear demand, or if there are signs
that the mailing-list is dying, or if it starts malfunctioning again.

Cheers

On Thu, May 12, 2022 at 4:08 PM Richard Eisenberg <lists at richarde.dev>
wrote:

> [ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list
> ]
>
> As a happy user of mailing lists and a skeptic of tools like Discourse,
> I've been reasonably pleased with my recent use of Discourse for some
> Haskell-related communication. The mailing list mode works well, and I
> imagine most of us can settle into using Discourse much like we use the
> current mailing list. Discourse has some settings that may need careful
> attention (e.g. it likes to limit posts to contain only 2 links until the
> poster has gained some level of reputation in the system), but I imagine
> these can be tuned to our liking.
>
> Richard
>
> > On May 12, 2022, at 5:57 AM, Ralf Jung <jung at mpi-sws.org> wrote:
> >
> > [ The Types Forum,
> http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list <
> http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list> ]
> >
> > 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$
> <
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://ralfj.de/research__;!!IBzWLUs!RXKu6AzQyKnk0mm4ucqeheRdTrOm1nMYErzL9mXosBkKZWy38pcogdrZtMBWV4Fi4RC2iSRJCekxCpdFaOytpWpl5Q$
> >
>