System/Forums/Migration

Introduction

We plan to migrate the forums from Mailman to Google Groups, which has similar features. The several Mailman forums will be combined into a single forum with a user experience essentially the same as a Mailman forum.

The forums currently use Mailman 2.1, an old version now in maintenance mode. It has served us well over the years, but is a lot of work to set up and maintain. Not least, Mailman requires our own mail server, while Google Groups would take care of all mail handling. Since our webserver is due for an upgrade, this is a good time to make the change.

A new feature is a web page with a browsable message archive, whereas right now anyone who just wants to read the forums without subscribing has to use the website forum search page. Members of the forum can also post messages directly from this web page.

The new forum email address will be forum@jsoftware.com.

Archives

Future mails would be archived on Google Groups, so initially there would be two archives:

• the old Mailman archives on our website from 1998 up to the changeover date
• the new Google Groups archive, which will date from 2012

With a bit of work we might be able to create a single archive.

Subscriptions

To avoid spam, Mailman forum posting is restricted to subscribers. In Google Groups the restriction is to those who have joined the group.

When we migrate the forums, we should be able to sign up most of subscribed forum members to the new group, and send invites to the remaining members. Member's delivery options will also be migrated, i.e. to receive each email, or a daily digest, or no mail.

We expect some existing forum subscribers will just want to read the forum archives on the web and not join the groups.

Google Account

Forum subscribers need not have a Google Account. As far as we know, there are only two restrictions for subscribers without a Google Account:

• you cannot login and send a message from the message archive page. Instead you can only post messages from the subscribed email account (like the current Mailman forums).
• you cannot change forum settings, e.g. to switch between email digests and separate emails. For these you need to contact the forum owner.

Note that you could remove any restrictions by creating a Google Account. This does not mean that you need to use gmail. Instead, it just means that you can login to the Google Group.

Timeline

We plan to migrate the forums on Jan 1 2024.

Feedback

Please send comments to the general forum.