On scikit-image, we've moderated *subscriptions*, and only subscribers can post without being moderated, but still spam gets through, because it's hard to vet whether an email address is "genuine", so sometimes we allow the subscription, and immediately receive resulting spam. A "reputation" system in which the first, say, 3 emails from a user are moderated would be most useful. I don't think mailman provides this yet. (?)
My personal impression is that users/newcomers (as opposed to long-time core developers) definitely prefer Discourse to email. I also think it is a better experience browsing/searching the archives than mailman, despite recent improvements to the latter. So, without wanting to minimise the downsides, I do think that putting everyone on Discourse is the best approach forward. From what I can tell, none of the mailing lists that have made the move (Numba, Bokeh, Matplotlib) have regretted it.
Juan.
+1 I do think Discourse would be a significantly better experience for new users, and would make it easier to get newcomers involved in NumPy. It's simply a much more accessible tool than mailing lists.
On Wed, 29 Sep 2021, at 5:11 PM, Matti Picus wrote:
> On 29/9/21 9:07 pm, Stefan van der Walt wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 29, 2021, at 03:02, Ralf Gommers wrote:
>>> We don't have admin access to the python.org <http://python.org>
>>> lists, so this is a bit of a problem. We have never had a spam
>>> problem, so we can ask to block this user first. If it continues to
>>> happen, we may be able to moderate new subscriber emails, but we do
>>> need to ask for permissions first and I'm not sure we'll get them.
>>>
>>> A better solution longer term is migrating to Discourse, which has
>>> far better moderation tools than Mailman and is also more
>>> approachable for people not used to mailing lists (which is most
>>> newcomers to open source). Migrating is a bit of a pain, but with the
>>> new CZI grant having a focus on improving the contributor experience,
>>> we should be able to do this.
>>
>> I would like to offer the use of https://discuss.scientific-python.org
>> <https://discuss.scientific-python.org>. I would be happy to handle
>> email list migration, and have created the following two categories
>> for NumPy discussion:
>>
>> User discussion: https://discuss.scientific-python.org/c/user/numpy
>> <https://discuss.scientific-python.org/c/user/numpy/19>
>> Contributor discussion:
>> https://discuss.scientific-python.org/c/contributor/numpy
>> <https://discuss.scientific-python.org/c/contributor/numpy/18>
>>
>> We're happy to support this as part of the Scientific Python ecosystem
>> grant, and will give admin rights to anyone on the NumPy developer
>> team who wants to help manage / moderate discussions.
>>
>> Of course, we can also just delete these if the team prefers to have
>> their discussions somewhere else. But I think there is a benefit to
>> bringing community discussions together in one place.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Stéfan
>
>
> Thanks for the offer to host the discussions on discourse. Personally, I
> find the email interface to discourse very clunky. I would prefer we
> exhaust the possibilities to stay on e-mail only before moving to discourse.
>
> Matti
>
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