![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/03f2d50ce2e8d713af6058d2aeafab74.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Hi All, Today both of the python.org mailing lists I'm subscribed to (numpy and scipy-dev) got the same kind of link shortener spam. I assume all the mailing lists started getting these, and that these won't go away for a while. Is there any way to prevent these, short of moderating emails from new list members? Assuming the engine even supports that. There aren't many emails, especially from new members, and I can't think of other ways that ensure no false positives in filtering. Since maintainer time is precious, I can volunteer to moderate such emails if needed. Cheers, András
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5f88830d19f9c83e2ddfd913496c5025.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 9:32 AM Andras Deak <deak.andris@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't see these on https://mail.python.org/archives/list/numpy-discussion@python.org/, nor did I receive them (and I did check my spam folder). Do you see it in the archive, or do you understand why you do receive them? Ralf
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/03f2d50ce2e8d713af6058d2aeafab74.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 11:15 AM Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry for not being specific: they were sent as replies to the latest thread on each list, see e.g. at the bottom (6th email, 5th reply) of https://mail.python.org/archives/list/numpy-discussion@python.org/thread/BLC... András
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/03f2d50ce2e8d713af6058d2aeafab74.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 11:28 AM Andras Deak <deak.andris@gmail.com> wrote:
Found the permalink: (warning, spam link there) https://mail.python.org/archives/list/numpy-discussion@python.org/message/MW...
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5f88830d19f9c83e2ddfd913496c5025.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 11:33 AM Andras Deak <deak.andris@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks! 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. Cheers, Ralf
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/03f2d50ce2e8d713af6058d2aeafab74.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 12:02 PM Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
Unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) there are multiple accounts doing this https://mail.python.org/archives/search?q=bit.ly&page=1&sort=date-desc This is why I figured that an _a posteriori_ whack-a-mole against these specific users might not be a feasible solution to the underlying problem. András
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/81e62cb212edf2a8402c842b120d9f31.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
I'd like to reheat the proposition that we enable discussion feature on GitHub for the repos. Not only this makes things a bit more streamlined (transfer nonbug reports to discussions to handle noise there) but also makes it easier to control the discussions. Moreover since it is GitHub there are API-based ways to import mailing lists for NumPy and SciPy with a bit less effort. On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 12:11 PM Andras Deak <deak.andris@gmail.com> wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5f88830d19f9c83e2ddfd913496c5025.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 12:51 PM Ilhan Polat <ilhanpolat@gmail.com> wrote:
This was discussed in the community meeting today. No one was really enthusiastic, concerns that were brought up included the lack of an email interface, and an unclear boundary between issues and discussions. If we move, importing the mailing list archives will clearly be important though, any replacement should be able to do this. Cheers, Ralf
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/d9ac9213ada4a807322f99081296784b.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021, at 13:58, Ralf Gommers wrote:
This was discussed in the community meeting today. No one was really enthusiastic, concerns that were brought up included the lack of an email interface, and an unclear boundary between issues and discussions.
FWIW, Discourse has an email interface. I'm not sure what is meant by "unclear boundary between issues and discussions"—that is not something our mailing list provides either.
If we move, importing the mailing list archives will clearly be important though, any replacement should be able to do this.
python.org allows us to download an mbox backup of numpy-discussion, and this archive can be imported into discourse. I'd be happy to do so as a proof of concept, if that would be helpful. Stéfan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5f88830d19f9c83e2ddfd913496c5025.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 11:32 PM Stefan van der Walt <stefanv@berkeley.edu> wrote:
That was specifically about GitHub Issues vs. GitHub Discussions. It's often not clear if something is a bug or not, so moving items between those two tabs can get confusing quickly. It wasn't my remark, but in the one case where I tried out Discussions my experience was indeed the same - visitors to the repo don't quite know which one to use. Cheers, Ralf
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/d9ac9213ada4a807322f99081296784b.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021, at 03:02, Ralf Gommers wrote:
We don't have admin access to the 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. 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
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/008b55030cffb9a4c4f7d8422e10343e.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
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. On Wed, 29 Sep 2021, at 5:11 PM, Matti Picus wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/93a76a800ef6c5919baa8ba91120ee98.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 7:55 PM Juan Nunez-Iglesias <jni@fastmail.com> wrote:
+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.
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/b4f6d4f8b501cb05fd054944a166a121.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, 2021-09-29 at 11:07 -0700, Stefan van der Walt wrote:
I am +0.8 for building up a community forum there, for better or worse, a large chunk of the traffic here is just an announcement/formal list these days. It would be nice to have a community forum. +0.8 just because I am not sure I want to be pinned down on moderation.
email list migration, and have created the following two categories
Personally, I currently lean to +0 if we aim for a larger community forum, otherwise -0. I am not sure that moving the list in its current form/volume is worth annoying those who prefer mail. But, I also think the creation of a user forum can be distinct from moving the "formal" uses of this mailing list – at least for a while.
I do like is the idea of having a cross-project platform (both for devs and users/support). Not sure how well discourse will scale, if e.g. scipy also moved into one forum. But the tags and categories may have a lot of potential! If we have a plan e.g. to also move SciPy-dev to the same place, there could be a very concrete benefit of allowing easier reach across projects. (Even NumPy is pretty diverse in topics. Discussions in random numbers, fft, or linalg may find a lot of interest in SciPy.) Cheers, Sebastian
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5b924ad9a5d6dca646dfc417555304ca.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Although it is true that discourse is easier for newcomers in a lot of ways, it is far worse for governance and consensus. The mailing list, by having essentially sequential topics sent out to all subscribers is easier to keep track of than a large number of forum topics.
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6fabe1ad43806cd1893400059bd59231.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
To add to that, while it is redundant to maintain both a mailing list and a discourse, the latter requires significantly more moderation and policy (eg. What happens if users delete posts / accounts). It is a non trivial amount of work which I think should not be underestimated. A lot of other communities I'm part of have made the shift, but it has been undertaken to grow users, not to facilitate mailing list activities. 1. Nix discourse moderation team rfc - -> https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/102 2. Fortran Lang discourse moderation and coc - - > https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/welcome-to-discourse/7 There are many others but in particular, even if we go for a discourse we should still keep the mailing list for low volume, wide reach activity. At which point we're back to the original problem of spam. --- Rohit
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/b4929294417e9ac44c17967baae75a36.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Hi, On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 1:54 AM Rohit Goswami <r95g10@gmail.com> wrote:
Although it is true that discourse is easier for newcomers in a lot of ways, it is far worse for governance and consensus. The mailing list, by having essentially sequential topics sent out to all subscribers is easier to keep track of than a large number of forum topics.
Thanks for this - but - could you say more about what you mean here? In what way is the mailing list less of a problem in terms of governance and consensus? Is it just that - it is not easy to withdraw a mailing list post? I did have a quick look at the links you sent - but they seemed to be instances where the community took the opportunity to formalize a process that was already happening. I don't agree about it being easier to keep track of topics on a mailing list. Surely the opposite is true, and one of the main motivations for Discourse? I personally use the mailing list option to read posts in the first instance, but I don't remember feeling the need to know whether all subscribers have seen a particular post. In practice, mailing list mechanics mean that many people skip read their mail and miss discussions. Cheers, Matthew
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6fabe1ad43806cd1893400059bd59231.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
I guess then the approach overall would evolve to something like using the mailing list to announce discourse posts which need input. Though I would assume that the web interface essentially makes the mailing list almost like discourse, even for new users. The real issue IMO is still the moderation efforts and additional governance needed for maintaining discourse. --- Rohit
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/b4929294417e9ac44c17967baae75a36.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Hi, On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 1:57 PM Rohit Goswami <rgoswami@quansight.com> wrote:
I guess then the approach overall would evolve to something like using the mailing list to announce discourse posts which need input. Though I would assume that the web interface essentially makes the mailing list almost like discourse, even for new users.
The real issue IMO is still the moderation efforts and additional governance needed for maintaining discourse.
Yes - that was what I meant. I do see that mailing lists are harder to moderate, in that once the email has gone out, it is difficult to revoke. So is the argument just that you *can* moderate on Discourse, therefore you need to think about it more? Do we have any reason to think that more moderation will in fact be needed? We've needed very little so far on the mailing list, as far as I can see. Chers, Matthew
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/81e62cb212edf2a8402c842b120d9f31.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
The reason why I mentioned GH discussions is that literally everybody who is engaged with the code, is familiar with the format, included in the codebase product and has replies in built unlike the Discourse (opinion is mine) useless flat discussion design where replies are all over the place just like the mailing list in case you are not using a tree view supporting client. Hence topic hijacking is one of the main usability difficulties of emails. The goal here is to have a coherent engagement with everyone not just within a small circle, such that there is indeed a discussion happening rather than a few people chiming in. It would be a nice analytics exercise to have how many active users using these lists. I'd say 20-25 max for contribs and team members which is really not much. I know some people are still using IRC and mailing lists but I wouldn't argue that these are the modern media to have proper engaging discussions. "Who said to whom" is the bread and butter of such discussions. And I do think that discourse is exactly the same thing with mailing lists with a slightly better UI while virtually everyone else in the world is doing replies. I would be willing to help with the objections raised since I have been using GH discussions for quite a while now and there are many tools available for administration of the discussions. For example, https://github.blog/changelog/2021-09-14-notification-emails-for-discussions... is a recent feature. I don't work for GitHub obviously and have nothing to do with them but the reasons I'm willing to hear about. On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 3:07 PM Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/03f2d50ce2e8d713af6058d2aeafab74.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 4:27 PM Ilhan Polat <ilhanpolat@gmail.com> wrote:
(There are probably a lot of users like myself who follow the mailing list discussions but rarely feel the need to speak up themselves. Not that this says much either way in the discussion, just pointing it out). I'm not intimately familiar with github discussions (I've only used it a few times), but as far as I can tell it only has answers (or "comments") and comments (or "replies") on answers, i.e. 2 levels of replies rather than a flat single level of replies. If this is indeed the case then I'm not sure it's that much better than a flat system, since when things really get hairy then 2 levels are probably also insufficient to ensure "who said to whom". The "clear replies" argument would hold stronger (in my peanut-gallery opinion) for a medium that supports full reply trees like many comment sections do on various websites. András
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6fabe1ad43806cd1893400059bd59231.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
I’m firmly against GH discussions because of the upvoting mechanism. We don’t need to be Reddit or SO. .NET had a bad experience with the discussions as well [1]. [1] https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/29935 — Rohit On 1 Oct 2021, at 15:04, Andras Deak wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/b4929294417e9ac44c17967baae75a36.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Only to say that: * I used to have a very firm preference for mail, because I'm pretty happy with Gmail as a mail interface, and I didn't want to have another channel I had to monitor, but * I've spent more time on Discourse over the last year, mainly on Jupyter, but I have also set up instances for my own projects. I now have a fairly strong preference for Discourse, because of its very nice Markdown authoring, pleasant web interface for reviewing discussions and reasonable mailing list mode. * I have hardly used Github Discussions, so I can't comment on them. Are there large projects that are happy with them? How does that compare to Discourse, for example? * It will surely cause some harm if it is not clear where discussions happen, mainly (mailing list, Discourse, Github Discussions) so it seems to me better to decide on one standard place, and commit to that. Cheers, Matthew On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 4:39 PM Rohit Goswami <rgoswami@quansight.com> wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/93a76a800ef6c5919baa8ba91120ee98.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 8:55 AM Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:
+1 Markdown support, the ability to edit/delete posts, a good web interface and the possibility for new-comers to jump into an ongoing discussion are all major advantages to Discourse. I am not concerned about spam management or moderation. NumPy-Discussion is not a very popular form, and we have plenty of mature contributors to help moderate.
GitHub Discussions is more of a Q&A platform, like Stackoverflow. I don't think it really makes sense for free form discussion.
+1 let's pick a place and stick to it!
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/81e62cb212edf2a8402c842b120d9f31.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
They are not used, by default, it's date ordered you can choose whichever. Voting plays no role unless you want to sort by votes.
Given that we've had a literal order of magnitude more messages about the spam than the spam itself, maybe it's just a blip?
GitHub Discussions is more of a Q&A platform, like Stackoverflow. I don't
Indeed that is the case :) Guilty as charged. I'm probably being a bit opportunist since hijacking is easy here think it really makes sense for free form discussion. I don't see how it is to be honest. I'm hearing this complaint quite often but I can't see how that is. That's quite not my experience. Especially in node.js repo and other participants of the discussions beta are quite happy with it. Maybe I should rephrase why I am mentining this; Very often, some thing is popping up in the issues asking for whether X is suitable for Sci/NumPy and we lead the user here and more often than not they don't follow up. I can't blame them because the whole mailing list experience especially for the newcomers is a dreadful experience and most of the time you don't get any feedback. Also you can't move because in the issue we told them to come here and nobody is interested, then things stop unless someone nudges the repo issue which was the idea in the first place. So in a way we are putting this barrier as in "go talk to the elders in the mountain and bring some shiny gems on your way back" which makes not much sense. We are using the issues and PRs anyways to discuss stuff willingly or not so I can't say I follow the argument for the holistic mailing list format. This doesn't mean that I ignore the convenience because that was the case in the last decades. I'm totally fine with it. But if we are going to move it let's make it count not switch to an identical platform just for the sake of it. If not Github then something actually encourages the community to join and not getting in the way. On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 6:31 PM Stephan Hoyer <shoyer@gmail.com> wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/93a76a800ef6c5919baa8ba91120ee98.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 10:21 AM Ilhan Polat <ilhanpolat@gmail.com> wrote:
I agree, "go talk to the elders in the mountain" is not a great experience. One of the other problems about mailing lists is that it's awkward or impossible to ping old discussions. E.g., if you find a mailing list thread discussing an issue from two years ago, you pretty much have to start a new thread to discuss it. I think GitHub discussions is a perfectly fine web-based platform and definitely an improvement over a mailing list, but do like Discourse a little better. It's literally one click for a user to sign up to post on Discourse if they already have a GitHub account.
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/764323a14e554c97ab74177e0bce51d4.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 3:35 AM Andras Deak <deak.andris@gmail.com> wrote:
Given that we've had a literal order of magnitude more messages about the spam than the spam itself, maybe it's just a blip? I will suggest that spam management is probably not a strong, much less a decisive, argument for migrating to a new discussion forum. -- Robert Kern
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/96dd777e397ab128fedab46af97a3a4a.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 9:50 AM Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
My thought too. I found the "spam" from the link and recalled that I had simply deleted it as irrelevant. Took about 5 seconds, one time. I don't think changing things is worth the churn unless we get buried in spam. I also like lists that are medium busy. I used to follow linux kernel development back around 2000, but eventually it became too busy to follow. Chuck
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/392f536486c50f46adbeee6c9417e442.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
i visited first time your site . i found informative article. https://bit.ly/3ARtne4
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/764323a14e554c97ab74177e0bce51d4.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Tue, Oct 5, 2021 at 4:07 AM <paytonmorrison48@gmail.com> wrote: [spam] Okay, now, they're just messing with us. -- Robert Kern
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/0383e4cae325f65a1bbd906be4be2276.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Coming back to earth on the original discussion, is there really no way to moderate new users on the mailing list platform used by this list (mailman?)? On the SymPy list, which uses Google Groups, we moderate all new users, so that first time posts have to be moderated but after that people can post directly. We have had very minimal spam even in the queue (to be fair, I'm sure Google applies its own filtering), and only one in recent memory that got through, due to the moderators not reading the message contents carefully enough. Aaron Meurer On Tue, Oct 5, 2021 at 7:23 AM Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/d9ac9213ada4a807322f99081296784b.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Oct 6, 2021, at 13:57, Aaron Meurer wrote:
For scikit-image we have to pre-approve all new posters and subscribers. The posts are fine, but vetting subscribers is a pain because you can't just Google every email to find out if it is legit. The spammers are getting smarter; one of them recently used `kern` in their name to get around our moderation :) We've updated discuss.scientific-python.org to allow "Mailing list mode", which should simulate what Matti and Chuck want (i.e., receiving emails for each post, and being able to reply). You can enable it under your user profile if you want to try it out. Stéfan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/1198e2d145718c841565712312e04227.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Hello everyone, Just my 2 cents: I marked a few of the actual spam e-mails on this and the SciPy-user list as spam on my client, and it seems many random e-mails get sent to spam now, from both the NumPy and SciPy lists. I’ve tried to pull as many out as possible by moving them to inbox, hoping it’ll get better, but it hasn’t so far. I’d very much prefer Discourse or GitHub discussions, of the two I prefer Discussions, but Discourse isn’t too bad either. With best regards, Hameer Abbasi
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/18d7c4503b713c388142c34a10e26082.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On 10/10/2021 18:37, Hameer Abbasi wrote:
You should complain about this to your email service provider. provider (despite being one of the largest corporations in the world, and being the email service one of it core busyness) is unable to provide you a reliable service is the way forward. Also, in the case of Github Discussions, I don't think that moving to a service not controlled by the community is the right thing, especially as your previous statement already demonstrates that abdicating control may culminate with the tools we use not operating in the way we would like them to. Cheers, Dan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/72f994ca072df3a3d2c3db8a137790fd.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
It seems the spammers have figured out how to get onto discourse as well. The last two messages on https://discuss.python.org/t/pypi-user-feedback/11125/4 (on the python discourse instance) are the first I have seen there. Matti On 10/10/21 7:37 pm, Hameer Abbasi wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/008b55030cffb9a4c4f7d8422e10343e.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
The upside of discourse, though, is that those messages can be permanently deleted by moderators. In contrast, the mailing list archives appear unalterable... At any rate, those two messages (assuming we're talking about the same ones) don't appear to be spam, but rather a misunderstanding of the latest "submit feedback" link on PyPI. On Mon, 18 Oct 2021, at 12:09 AM, Matti Picus wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5f88830d19f9c83e2ddfd913496c5025.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 9:32 AM Andras Deak <deak.andris@gmail.com> wrote:
I don't see these on https://mail.python.org/archives/list/numpy-discussion@python.org/, nor did I receive them (and I did check my spam folder). Do you see it in the archive, or do you understand why you do receive them? Ralf
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/03f2d50ce2e8d713af6058d2aeafab74.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 11:15 AM Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry for not being specific: they were sent as replies to the latest thread on each list, see e.g. at the bottom (6th email, 5th reply) of https://mail.python.org/archives/list/numpy-discussion@python.org/thread/BLC... András
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/03f2d50ce2e8d713af6058d2aeafab74.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 11:28 AM Andras Deak <deak.andris@gmail.com> wrote:
Found the permalink: (warning, spam link there) https://mail.python.org/archives/list/numpy-discussion@python.org/message/MW...
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5f88830d19f9c83e2ddfd913496c5025.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 11:33 AM Andras Deak <deak.andris@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks! 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. Cheers, Ralf
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/03f2d50ce2e8d713af6058d2aeafab74.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 12:02 PM Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
Unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) there are multiple accounts doing this https://mail.python.org/archives/search?q=bit.ly&page=1&sort=date-desc This is why I figured that an _a posteriori_ whack-a-mole against these specific users might not be a feasible solution to the underlying problem. András
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/81e62cb212edf2a8402c842b120d9f31.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
I'd like to reheat the proposition that we enable discussion feature on GitHub for the repos. Not only this makes things a bit more streamlined (transfer nonbug reports to discussions to handle noise there) but also makes it easier to control the discussions. Moreover since it is GitHub there are API-based ways to import mailing lists for NumPy and SciPy with a bit less effort. On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 12:11 PM Andras Deak <deak.andris@gmail.com> wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5f88830d19f9c83e2ddfd913496c5025.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 12:51 PM Ilhan Polat <ilhanpolat@gmail.com> wrote:
This was discussed in the community meeting today. No one was really enthusiastic, concerns that were brought up included the lack of an email interface, and an unclear boundary between issues and discussions. If we move, importing the mailing list archives will clearly be important though, any replacement should be able to do this. Cheers, Ralf
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/d9ac9213ada4a807322f99081296784b.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021, at 13:58, Ralf Gommers wrote:
This was discussed in the community meeting today. No one was really enthusiastic, concerns that were brought up included the lack of an email interface, and an unclear boundary between issues and discussions.
FWIW, Discourse has an email interface. I'm not sure what is meant by "unclear boundary between issues and discussions"—that is not something our mailing list provides either.
If we move, importing the mailing list archives will clearly be important though, any replacement should be able to do this.
python.org allows us to download an mbox backup of numpy-discussion, and this archive can be imported into discourse. I'd be happy to do so as a proof of concept, if that would be helpful. Stéfan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5f88830d19f9c83e2ddfd913496c5025.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 11:32 PM Stefan van der Walt <stefanv@berkeley.edu> wrote:
That was specifically about GitHub Issues vs. GitHub Discussions. It's often not clear if something is a bug or not, so moving items between those two tabs can get confusing quickly. It wasn't my remark, but in the one case where I tried out Discussions my experience was indeed the same - visitors to the repo don't quite know which one to use. Cheers, Ralf
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/d9ac9213ada4a807322f99081296784b.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021, at 03:02, Ralf Gommers wrote:
We don't have admin access to the 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. 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
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/008b55030cffb9a4c4f7d8422e10343e.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
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. On Wed, 29 Sep 2021, at 5:11 PM, Matti Picus wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/93a76a800ef6c5919baa8ba91120ee98.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 7:55 PM Juan Nunez-Iglesias <jni@fastmail.com> wrote:
+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.
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/b4f6d4f8b501cb05fd054944a166a121.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, 2021-09-29 at 11:07 -0700, Stefan van der Walt wrote:
I am +0.8 for building up a community forum there, for better or worse, a large chunk of the traffic here is just an announcement/formal list these days. It would be nice to have a community forum. +0.8 just because I am not sure I want to be pinned down on moderation.
email list migration, and have created the following two categories
Personally, I currently lean to +0 if we aim for a larger community forum, otherwise -0. I am not sure that moving the list in its current form/volume is worth annoying those who prefer mail. But, I also think the creation of a user forum can be distinct from moving the "formal" uses of this mailing list – at least for a while.
I do like is the idea of having a cross-project platform (both for devs and users/support). Not sure how well discourse will scale, if e.g. scipy also moved into one forum. But the tags and categories may have a lot of potential! If we have a plan e.g. to also move SciPy-dev to the same place, there could be a very concrete benefit of allowing easier reach across projects. (Even NumPy is pretty diverse in topics. Discussions in random numbers, fft, or linalg may find a lot of interest in SciPy.) Cheers, Sebastian
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/5b924ad9a5d6dca646dfc417555304ca.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Although it is true that discourse is easier for newcomers in a lot of ways, it is far worse for governance and consensus. The mailing list, by having essentially sequential topics sent out to all subscribers is easier to keep track of than a large number of forum topics.
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6fabe1ad43806cd1893400059bd59231.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
To add to that, while it is redundant to maintain both a mailing list and a discourse, the latter requires significantly more moderation and policy (eg. What happens if users delete posts / accounts). It is a non trivial amount of work which I think should not be underestimated. A lot of other communities I'm part of have made the shift, but it has been undertaken to grow users, not to facilitate mailing list activities. 1. Nix discourse moderation team rfc - -> https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/102 2. Fortran Lang discourse moderation and coc - - > https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/welcome-to-discourse/7 There are many others but in particular, even if we go for a discourse we should still keep the mailing list for low volume, wide reach activity. At which point we're back to the original problem of spam. --- Rohit
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/b4929294417e9ac44c17967baae75a36.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Hi, On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 1:54 AM Rohit Goswami <r95g10@gmail.com> wrote:
Although it is true that discourse is easier for newcomers in a lot of ways, it is far worse for governance and consensus. The mailing list, by having essentially sequential topics sent out to all subscribers is easier to keep track of than a large number of forum topics.
Thanks for this - but - could you say more about what you mean here? In what way is the mailing list less of a problem in terms of governance and consensus? Is it just that - it is not easy to withdraw a mailing list post? I did have a quick look at the links you sent - but they seemed to be instances where the community took the opportunity to formalize a process that was already happening. I don't agree about it being easier to keep track of topics on a mailing list. Surely the opposite is true, and one of the main motivations for Discourse? I personally use the mailing list option to read posts in the first instance, but I don't remember feeling the need to know whether all subscribers have seen a particular post. In practice, mailing list mechanics mean that many people skip read their mail and miss discussions. Cheers, Matthew
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6fabe1ad43806cd1893400059bd59231.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
I guess then the approach overall would evolve to something like using the mailing list to announce discourse posts which need input. Though I would assume that the web interface essentially makes the mailing list almost like discourse, even for new users. The real issue IMO is still the moderation efforts and additional governance needed for maintaining discourse. --- Rohit
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/b4929294417e9ac44c17967baae75a36.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Hi, On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 1:57 PM Rohit Goswami <rgoswami@quansight.com> wrote:
I guess then the approach overall would evolve to something like using the mailing list to announce discourse posts which need input. Though I would assume that the web interface essentially makes the mailing list almost like discourse, even for new users.
The real issue IMO is still the moderation efforts and additional governance needed for maintaining discourse.
Yes - that was what I meant. I do see that mailing lists are harder to moderate, in that once the email has gone out, it is difficult to revoke. So is the argument just that you *can* moderate on Discourse, therefore you need to think about it more? Do we have any reason to think that more moderation will in fact be needed? We've needed very little so far on the mailing list, as far as I can see. Chers, Matthew
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/81e62cb212edf2a8402c842b120d9f31.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
The reason why I mentioned GH discussions is that literally everybody who is engaged with the code, is familiar with the format, included in the codebase product and has replies in built unlike the Discourse (opinion is mine) useless flat discussion design where replies are all over the place just like the mailing list in case you are not using a tree view supporting client. Hence topic hijacking is one of the main usability difficulties of emails. The goal here is to have a coherent engagement with everyone not just within a small circle, such that there is indeed a discussion happening rather than a few people chiming in. It would be a nice analytics exercise to have how many active users using these lists. I'd say 20-25 max for contribs and team members which is really not much. I know some people are still using IRC and mailing lists but I wouldn't argue that these are the modern media to have proper engaging discussions. "Who said to whom" is the bread and butter of such discussions. And I do think that discourse is exactly the same thing with mailing lists with a slightly better UI while virtually everyone else in the world is doing replies. I would be willing to help with the objections raised since I have been using GH discussions for quite a while now and there are many tools available for administration of the discussions. For example, https://github.blog/changelog/2021-09-14-notification-emails-for-discussions... is a recent feature. I don't work for GitHub obviously and have nothing to do with them but the reasons I'm willing to hear about. On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 3:07 PM Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/03f2d50ce2e8d713af6058d2aeafab74.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 4:27 PM Ilhan Polat <ilhanpolat@gmail.com> wrote:
(There are probably a lot of users like myself who follow the mailing list discussions but rarely feel the need to speak up themselves. Not that this says much either way in the discussion, just pointing it out). I'm not intimately familiar with github discussions (I've only used it a few times), but as far as I can tell it only has answers (or "comments") and comments (or "replies") on answers, i.e. 2 levels of replies rather than a flat single level of replies. If this is indeed the case then I'm not sure it's that much better than a flat system, since when things really get hairy then 2 levels are probably also insufficient to ensure "who said to whom". The "clear replies" argument would hold stronger (in my peanut-gallery opinion) for a medium that supports full reply trees like many comment sections do on various websites. András
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/6fabe1ad43806cd1893400059bd59231.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
I’m firmly against GH discussions because of the upvoting mechanism. We don’t need to be Reddit or SO. .NET had a bad experience with the discussions as well [1]. [1] https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/29935 — Rohit On 1 Oct 2021, at 15:04, Andras Deak wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/b4929294417e9ac44c17967baae75a36.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Only to say that: * I used to have a very firm preference for mail, because I'm pretty happy with Gmail as a mail interface, and I didn't want to have another channel I had to monitor, but * I've spent more time on Discourse over the last year, mainly on Jupyter, but I have also set up instances for my own projects. I now have a fairly strong preference for Discourse, because of its very nice Markdown authoring, pleasant web interface for reviewing discussions and reasonable mailing list mode. * I have hardly used Github Discussions, so I can't comment on them. Are there large projects that are happy with them? How does that compare to Discourse, for example? * It will surely cause some harm if it is not clear where discussions happen, mainly (mailing list, Discourse, Github Discussions) so it seems to me better to decide on one standard place, and commit to that. Cheers, Matthew On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 4:39 PM Rohit Goswami <rgoswami@quansight.com> wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/93a76a800ef6c5919baa8ba91120ee98.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 8:55 AM Matthew Brett <matthew.brett@gmail.com> wrote:
+1 Markdown support, the ability to edit/delete posts, a good web interface and the possibility for new-comers to jump into an ongoing discussion are all major advantages to Discourse. I am not concerned about spam management or moderation. NumPy-Discussion is not a very popular form, and we have plenty of mature contributors to help moderate.
GitHub Discussions is more of a Q&A platform, like Stackoverflow. I don't think it really makes sense for free form discussion.
+1 let's pick a place and stick to it!
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/81e62cb212edf2a8402c842b120d9f31.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
They are not used, by default, it's date ordered you can choose whichever. Voting plays no role unless you want to sort by votes.
Given that we've had a literal order of magnitude more messages about the spam than the spam itself, maybe it's just a blip?
GitHub Discussions is more of a Q&A platform, like Stackoverflow. I don't
Indeed that is the case :) Guilty as charged. I'm probably being a bit opportunist since hijacking is easy here think it really makes sense for free form discussion. I don't see how it is to be honest. I'm hearing this complaint quite often but I can't see how that is. That's quite not my experience. Especially in node.js repo and other participants of the discussions beta are quite happy with it. Maybe I should rephrase why I am mentining this; Very often, some thing is popping up in the issues asking for whether X is suitable for Sci/NumPy and we lead the user here and more often than not they don't follow up. I can't blame them because the whole mailing list experience especially for the newcomers is a dreadful experience and most of the time you don't get any feedback. Also you can't move because in the issue we told them to come here and nobody is interested, then things stop unless someone nudges the repo issue which was the idea in the first place. So in a way we are putting this barrier as in "go talk to the elders in the mountain and bring some shiny gems on your way back" which makes not much sense. We are using the issues and PRs anyways to discuss stuff willingly or not so I can't say I follow the argument for the holistic mailing list format. This doesn't mean that I ignore the convenience because that was the case in the last decades. I'm totally fine with it. But if we are going to move it let's make it count not switch to an identical platform just for the sake of it. If not Github then something actually encourages the community to join and not getting in the way. On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 6:31 PM Stephan Hoyer <shoyer@gmail.com> wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/93a76a800ef6c5919baa8ba91120ee98.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 10:21 AM Ilhan Polat <ilhanpolat@gmail.com> wrote:
I agree, "go talk to the elders in the mountain" is not a great experience. One of the other problems about mailing lists is that it's awkward or impossible to ping old discussions. E.g., if you find a mailing list thread discussing an issue from two years ago, you pretty much have to start a new thread to discuss it. I think GitHub discussions is a perfectly fine web-based platform and definitely an improvement over a mailing list, but do like Discourse a little better. It's literally one click for a user to sign up to post on Discourse if they already have a GitHub account.
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/764323a14e554c97ab74177e0bce51d4.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 3:35 AM Andras Deak <deak.andris@gmail.com> wrote:
Given that we've had a literal order of magnitude more messages about the spam than the spam itself, maybe it's just a blip? I will suggest that spam management is probably not a strong, much less a decisive, argument for migrating to a new discussion forum. -- Robert Kern
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/96dd777e397ab128fedab46af97a3a4a.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 9:50 AM Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
My thought too. I found the "spam" from the link and recalled that I had simply deleted it as irrelevant. Took about 5 seconds, one time. I don't think changing things is worth the churn unless we get buried in spam. I also like lists that are medium busy. I used to follow linux kernel development back around 2000, but eventually it became too busy to follow. Chuck
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/392f536486c50f46adbeee6c9417e442.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
i visited first time your site . i found informative article. https://bit.ly/3ARtne4
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/764323a14e554c97ab74177e0bce51d4.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Tue, Oct 5, 2021 at 4:07 AM <paytonmorrison48@gmail.com> wrote: [spam] Okay, now, they're just messing with us. -- Robert Kern
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/0383e4cae325f65a1bbd906be4be2276.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Coming back to earth on the original discussion, is there really no way to moderate new users on the mailing list platform used by this list (mailman?)? On the SymPy list, which uses Google Groups, we moderate all new users, so that first time posts have to be moderated but after that people can post directly. We have had very minimal spam even in the queue (to be fair, I'm sure Google applies its own filtering), and only one in recent memory that got through, due to the moderators not reading the message contents carefully enough. Aaron Meurer On Tue, Oct 5, 2021 at 7:23 AM Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/d9ac9213ada4a807322f99081296784b.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On Wed, Oct 6, 2021, at 13:57, Aaron Meurer wrote:
For scikit-image we have to pre-approve all new posters and subscribers. The posts are fine, but vetting subscribers is a pain because you can't just Google every email to find out if it is legit. The spammers are getting smarter; one of them recently used `kern` in their name to get around our moderation :) We've updated discuss.scientific-python.org to allow "Mailing list mode", which should simulate what Matti and Chuck want (i.e., receiving emails for each post, and being able to reply). You can enable it under your user profile if you want to try it out. Stéfan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/1198e2d145718c841565712312e04227.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
Hello everyone, Just my 2 cents: I marked a few of the actual spam e-mails on this and the SciPy-user list as spam on my client, and it seems many random e-mails get sent to spam now, from both the NumPy and SciPy lists. I’ve tried to pull as many out as possible by moving them to inbox, hoping it’ll get better, but it hasn’t so far. I’d very much prefer Discourse or GitHub discussions, of the two I prefer Discussions, but Discourse isn’t too bad either. With best regards, Hameer Abbasi
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/18d7c4503b713c388142c34a10e26082.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
On 10/10/2021 18:37, Hameer Abbasi wrote:
You should complain about this to your email service provider. provider (despite being one of the largest corporations in the world, and being the email service one of it core busyness) is unable to provide you a reliable service is the way forward. Also, in the case of Github Discussions, I don't think that moving to a service not controlled by the community is the right thing, especially as your previous statement already demonstrates that abdicating control may culminate with the tools we use not operating in the way we would like them to. Cheers, Dan
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/72f994ca072df3a3d2c3db8a137790fd.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
It seems the spammers have figured out how to get onto discourse as well. The last two messages on https://discuss.python.org/t/pypi-user-feedback/11125/4 (on the python discourse instance) are the first I have seen there. Matti On 10/10/21 7:37 pm, Hameer Abbasi wrote:
![](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/008b55030cffb9a4c4f7d8422e10343e.jpg?s=120&d=mm&r=g)
The upside of discourse, though, is that those messages can be permanently deleted by moderators. In contrast, the mailing list archives appear unalterable... At any rate, those two messages (assuming we're talking about the same ones) don't appear to be spam, but rather a misunderstanding of the latest "submit feedback" link on PyPI. On Mon, 18 Oct 2021, at 12:09 AM, Matti Picus wrote:
participants (18)
-
Aaron Meurer
-
Andras Deak
-
Charles R Harris
-
Daniele Nicolodi
-
Hameer Abbasi
-
Ilhan Polat
-
Juan Nunez-Iglesias
-
Matthew Brett
-
Matti Picus
-
paytonmorrison48@gmail.com
-
Ralf Gommers
-
Robert Kern
-
Rohit Goswami
-
Rohit Goswami
-
Roman Yurchak
-
Sebastian Berg
-
Stefan van der Walt
-
Stephan Hoyer