On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 1:32 AM, Anton Vodonosov avodonosov@yandex.ruwrote:
Hans, could you estimate from you experience during the last years, how much man-hours per year it took to admin cl.net?
I spent between 30 and 90 minutes each month running the mailing lists (bounce processing, user creation, user requests).
[...] So I agree, the current problems are caused by political issue:
Who "owns" cl.net? Who have right to object to changes or vote about the future? How decisions are made?
My reason to stop wanting to maintain common-lisp.net was political: Drew came up with a new common-lisp.net without involving me or others. He set up a new system and infrastructure and then offered me that I could continue to contribute on that new technology stack he had chosen and set up. I was not interested, partly because I was not part of the technology selection process, partly because I did not have time to learn new technology stack without having a good reason to do so.
The trouble with common-lisp.net is that even though it is a useful service, it is not of vital importance to the community that uses it. There are other hosting options, and in particular source code hosting is something that common-lisp.net's primary purpose used to be, but that most projects no longer use. The biggest value of common-lisp.net is that it provides history in forms of URLs and working communication channels, in terms of the mailing lists. It would be in the best interest of the community to re-establish those services as they were before the migration happened.
The new mailing list software is inferior to mailman: It provides no web interface, no archiving that I see, no per-list configurability, no fine grained moderation options. The change to that new software has been disruptive to users because subject tagging is no longer done, and new filters had to be created to get incoming list email sorted away. While there may be other, invisible advantages of the new software, the switchover did not happen in the interest of the users.
-Hans