Dear Wikimedia mailing list admins,
As you may have heard, we will be upgrading the mailing list software to Mailman 3, which is a full rewrite, fixing lots of long standing issues, especially around security. A short list of improvements:
* One user account (no more monthly password reminder emails or list passwords) * Ability to search through archives * Posting through a web interface * A web interface that doesn't look like its from the early 2000s
For the most part, if you just send and receive mail from the list, nothing dramatic will change.
A test installation is available at https://lists-next.wikimedia.org/ if you'd like to take a look now (all data will eventually be deleted). We can import your list into the test system so you can look around the new interfaces, make sure settings were migrated correctly and archives display correctly.
We're still finalizing the exact dates, but we may start migrating mailing lists starting next week. They'll be migrated in batches, starting with lists with no archives, and then going by size of archive and # of subscribers. Expect very big/old lists (wikimedia-l, wikitech-l, etc.) to go last. We plan to send a notification to the list admins when we start migrating the list and once it's finished.
We will need help from list admins to make this go smoothly.
* If your list is obsolete or should be archived, please add "[OBSOLETE]" or "[ARCHIVED]" to the list description and we'll take care of the rest. * Please update your list description to indicate who the list admins are (either usernames, email addresses, etc.) * If you'd like to volunteer your list to go early, let us know. * On the other hand, if you think your list needs special handling and should go later, let us know as well. * It is our intention to have all mailing lists be publicly listed, please let us know if you have a reason that the existence of your list should be kept private. * If you've lost track of all the lists you're responsible for, we can look it up for you :) * The canonical URL of your mailing list will change. If you link to your mailing list in help pages, templates, etc. You should update it after migration. For example https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l will change to https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/ (we expect to provide redirects). * For public archives, we will ensure that archive links will not break. For private lists, we do not intend to support old archive URLs - if this is a big issue for you, please let us know.
There's probably stuff we missed to mention, if you have questions, concerns, comments, please let us know on this list or #wikimedia-tech on IRC.
For tracking the work see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T280322
Thanks, Amir (Ladsgroup) and Kunal (Legoktm)