On 4/10/2017 1:48 PM, Nathaniel Smith wrote:

On Mon, Apr 10, 2017 at 10:32 AM, Ethan Furman wrote:

...

Some people find it easier to follow this and other lists via gmane (http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.general), a service which offers a newsgroup interface to many online mailing lists.

Also, gmane has been dead for a few months (that link just says "Page Not Found") and its future is uncertain, so this bit isn't terribly helpful either...

The web interface does indeed seem to have been removed. Even news.gmane.org returns the same. The nntp interface remains for the present, as I still use it daily. (The headers of this message should indicate such.) If the nntp interface were to be taken down, I would like PSF to add news.python.org to continue the python mirrors. -- Terry Jan Reedy

On 10Apr2017 1032, Ethan Furman wrote:

Apparently the Windows installer mentions asking for help on Python List.

Feel free to email

Feel free to email

Yay! People actually read some of that text in the installer :) Currently the installer has the following message after you run a Repair (from Tools/msi/bundle/Default.wxl): href="mailto:python-list@python.org">python-list@python.org</a> if you continue to encounter issues. And this message after you uninstall: href="mailto:python-list@python.org">python-list@python.org</a> if you encountered problems.

If accessing Python List directly via email it is necessary to subscribe first -- perhaps that could be mentioned? Bonus Python Points for mentioning the other methods that do not require subscribing. :)

I wasn't aware of this - I'm sure I've emailed the list before without it being rejected, and I'm certainly not subscribed. Is it a recent change? Is it necessary? I'd be happy to change these to point somewhere else, but the challenge here is the installers are permanent - whatever we put in this message can never change. Given this thread immediately entered uncertainty about what other methods are actually working, I don't want to link to any of them :) Cheers, Steve

On 10/04/2017 21:48, Steve Dower wrote:

I wasn't aware of [the need to subscribe to Python list] - I'm sure I've emailed the list before without it being rejected, and I'm certainly not subscribed. Is it a recent change? Is it necessary?

As long as I've been involved, the list has been subscription-only with the first post moderated even after subscription (to prevent bot-subscription). But in fact we'd typically waved through any unsubscribed posts which were clearly genuine / on-topic etc. We changed the policy a year ago. In fact the discussion kicked off between the list moderators on 11th April 2016, exactly a year ago. The reasoning was that we were seeing people who had posted without being subscribed and who were not seeing replies because, by and large, people reply to the list and not to the OP. We felt that we were doing a disservice to people unfamiliar with the mailing list mechanism since they might not realise that people were replying to their question but via the list, to which they were not subscribed. Clearly other decisions are possible; but that's what we've stuck to since. (Pragmatically, we do in fact pass through certain posts which we recognise as long-time posters perhaps coming in from an unfamiliar account, say posting from their phone etc.) TJG