Hey,
Mailman, the software that powers our mailing lists, is extremely old, by
looking at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/ you can guess how old it is.
I would really like to upgrade it to mailman 3 which has these benefits:
* Much better security (including but not limited to
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T181803)
* Much better UI and UX
* Much easier moderation and maintaining mailing lists
* Ability to send mail from the web
* Ability to search in archives.
* Ability to like/dislike an email
* List admins will be able to delete emails, merge threads, and much more.
* Admins won't need to store passwords for each mailing list separately,
they just login as their account everywhere.
* The current mailman stores everything as files (even mailing list
settings), mailman3 actually uses a proper database for everything meaning
proper backup and recovery, high availability and much more.
I have already put up a test setup and humbly ask you (specially list
admins) to test it (and its admin interface), if you want to become a list
admin, drop me a message. Keep in mind that we don't maintain the software
so the most I can do is to change configuration and can't handle a feature
request or solve a bug (you are more than welcome to file it against
upstream though)
Here's the test setup:
*
https://lists.wmcloud.org
Here's a mailing list:
*
https://lists.wmcloud.org/postorius/lists/test.lists.wmcloud.org/
Here's an archive post:
*
https://lists.wmcloud.org/hyperkitty/list/test@lists.wmcloud.org/thread/RMQ…
Issues that I haven't figured out yet:
* This system has profile picture support but it's only gravatar which we
can't enable due to our privacy policy but when you disable it, it shows
empty squares and looks bad. Reported upstream [1] but also we can have a
gravatar proxy in production. And in the worst case scenario we can just
inject "$('.gravatar').remove();" and remove them. Feel free to chime in
in
the phabricator ticket in this regard:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T256541
* Upgrade will break archive links, making it work forever is not trivial
(you need write apache rewrite rule) (You can read about it in
https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/migration.html#other-considerations)
* Mailman allows us to upgrade mailing list by mailing list, that's good
but we haven't found a way to keep the old version and the new ones in sync
(archives, etc.). Maybe we migrate a mailing list and the archives for the
old version will stop getting updated. Would that work for you? Feel free
to chime in:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T256539
* We don't know what would be the size of the database after upgrade
because these two versions are so inherently different, one idea was to
check the size of a fully public mailing list, then move the files to the
test setup, upgrade it to the new version and check how it changes, then
extrapolate the size of the final database. The discussion around the
database is happening in
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T256538
If you want to help in the upgrade (like puppetzining its configuration,
etc.) just let me know and I add you to the project! It uses a stand-alone
puppetmaster so you don't need to get your puppet patches merged to see its
effects.
The main ticket about the upgrade:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T52864
[1]
https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty/-/issues/303#note_365162201
Hope that'll be useful for you :)
--
Amir (he/him)