I note that some of these are still very much active projects but they've scattered elsewhere over the years, for example cl-pdf hosts their code at github and appears to communicate pretty much exclusively through github Issues. Even some active projects hosted at our own gitlab may be communicating through gitlab Issues or other means and thus not register any mailing list traffic through our mailman.
Absolutely. Not suggesting we should clean out any projects on
c-l.net in any way, even the code archives present historical value. The mailing lists are just one aspect of our hosting infrastructure for projects.
Anyway, if none of a particular project's mailing lists have been active in several years, then it's difficult to make any case for keeping said list active, in the face of the overhead costs Erik mentions, especially if they can be re-activated easily when needed. However, in the Common Lisp space-time continuum, five years is not all that long. I'd be curious what the numbers look like if you go back eight or even 10 years?
If we go back 8 years the answer is 156 instead of 180. Going back 10 years with the approach that I took isn't so easy, because I was using the timestamps from the filesystem to assert the age of the archive files, but apparently the content of the filesystem has been cleanly set up between 8 and 10 years ago, because the number drops to 0 for 10 years.
Erik, did you say that you sent verification emails to the list owners of these lists?
To announce closing the list, you mean? No, not yet. The mails that go to the owners are mails that request moderation of non-member postings to the list. When those moderation requests bounce, the site owner gets notified, requiring action from the infrastructure team.
Is the list owner by definition the only moderator, or can they assign other moderators?
Moderators and owners are different roles that can be held by different (groups) of people (e-mail addresses, really). Lacking moderators, moderation requests go to the owners.
As I understand it, we can detect non-responsive moderators by seeing mails bounce to an admin account, is that right?
If so, how can volunteers sign up to be privvy to those bounced mails and perhaps help to mitigate? Is that just another list to sign up for through the mailman3 web page?
Not sure if creating a mailing list for this purpose would work, but it would definitely be an interesting use-case for a mailing list! At the moment, each mailing list has its own set of moderators, though.
One other question for Erik - are these active lists and archives publicly crawl-able?