Part 2 in our housecleaning series concerns our mailing lists. Hosting mailing lists is quite a pain and we’d rather leave this pain to people who specializein mailing lists. So, we are proposing to do the following things:
- Remove the under-utilized list musicbrainz-italian.
- Remove the musicbrainz-commits mailing list. Github (and similar sites) have better notification systems, so we don’t really need this list anymore.
- Ask the Xiph Foundation to find a new home for the XSPF Playlist mailing list.
- Remove the under-utilized musicbrainz-users list since the forums are predominantly used for end-user discussion. We’ll point people to the forums for those.
Finally, we would like to get some suggestions and feedback on where we should host our mailing lists. We’re considering:
- Nabble: This has gotten mixed reviews from various users.
- Librelist: This site is quite new and UI reservations have been noted about it.
- Savannah: This site has many more features than just mailing lists. We’re not certain if we can move only our mailing lists here.
- Google Groups: We’ve heard complaints about spam and spam fighting tools. Has this improved recently?
If you have any comments on any of these solutions or proposed list consolidation ideas, please let us know. Also, if you know of a cheap/free/good list provider that we didn’t list, please let us know!
MetaBrainz Blog 
My only concern is that it be accessible by the gmane list-news gateway so I can read it in an NNTP reader, without being on Usenet proper.
Their spam filtering is also quite effective, as is their web interface. It’s a shame they don’t actually host the mailinglists. 😉
My feedback about Google Groups : it does the job, but if you allow for non-subscribers of the ML to send emails, expect a lot of false spam positives. Reversely, but in a lesser extent, some false negatives get through, too.
I would hate using gogol groups. I like Nabble it’s like the least wost ML→Forum I know (I only know the two used at MB, the other being not so good, I don’t remember the name). 🙂
I’ll go and check the others you say and I don’t know yet.
Sorry, “hate” was a big word, I just don’t like it very much, and I’m not fair anyway since I don’t like mailing list.
I don’t understand the structure of gogol groups, it’s difficult to see where we are, what are the latest emails etc.
And most of all drawbacks, it requires you to have a gogol account… or does it not ?
Google Groups are just mailing lists. There is no reason why we couldn’t just reconfigure Nabble to use the new email address.
I vote for librelist, the technical foundation looks really clean, and as for UI issues, I think their web archive UI is irrelevant, since we can direct people who want a web view to read the list via gmane or nabble.
Isn’t there anything better than mailing lists, once a discussion extends to more than a few replies its very hard to keep track of every mini-discussion within.
Applause ijabz +12
The forums we have. Everyone knows I love the forum more than the ML. 😛
I’m not keen on using Google, I’d prefer to see an open solution. I don’t care much about the UI because I read the lists via gmane. The most important thing is that the archives are readily searchable and linkable via unobfuscated URLs.
Mailing lists suck. How about using something like Discourse for official business? It’s new, sure, but it looks very promising. It’s open, too.
Introduction: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/02/civilized-discourse-construction-kit.html
Official Site: http://www.discourse.org
jhamdotme: discourse is great for small websites. But firstly it’s still not for sale, as it’s not released and it needs ROR hosting platform which is quite expensive.
I’m more into simplified forum software like vanillaforums, although they still need so much love in coding 😦