Re: [gnu.org #1231740] gnu-misc-discuss broken?

[Bob Proulx]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> I could move this to address@hidden, but since Ian is the person
> actually talking with me, I need to make sure it reaches him.

Mail to address@hidden will reach Ian as he is subscribed to the
mailing list.  Ian has also subscribed address@hidden to it too.
Sending mail to mailman and Ian should receive two copies.  One direct
and one to sysadmin.  Sending to mailman and sysadmin and Ian should
receive three copies.  One direct, and two to sysadmin.  :-)

Additionally mail to the mailman list will reach Karl Berry and
myself.  Since the two of us are the most active at attending to
messages in the hold queue I appreciate being part of the discussion.

> To try to understand this response, I looked for the previous
> discussion.  I had trouble finding it.  Eventually I did find it by
> searching back to August.

I want to note that I was not aware of the previous conversation from
August.  If I had then I could have added to the conversation at that
time.  However I was almost certainly involved at that time.  I may
have been the one who approved the moderation of the message that we
are discussing now.

Am I to assume that someone complained that their message to one of
the mailing lists, and in particular gnu-misc-discuss, didn't get
processed immediately?  And that this happened in August 2017?  There
was only one message to the gnu-misc-discuss in the entire monthy of
August.  Looking at the mail headers from the archive I see that the
message had these datestamps.

Sent by the sender:
  Sun, 13 Aug 2017 00:30:03 -0500

Processed by sender's servers:
  Sun, 13 Aug 2017 07:30:05 +0200 (perhaps from Europe?) 
  Sun, 13 Aug 2017 07:30:08 +0200
  Sun, 13 Aug 2017 01:30:08 -0400 (US/Eastern)

Received by eggs.gnu.org:
  Sun, 13 Aug 2017 01:30:11 -0400
  Sun, 13 Aug 2017 01:30:16 -0400

Approved as a non-spam message to the mailing list:
  Sun, 13 Aug 2017 04:45:56 -0400
  Sun, 13 Aug 2017 02:45:56 -0600 (my US/Mountain timezone)

As I look at those headers I deduce that the message was sent in what
was the middle of the US night.  It sat in the hold queue for
moderation for 3h15m45s at which time it was approved and was posted
to the mailing list.

Due to the time of the night that it was approved I think it very
likely that I was the one that approved that message.  I am often
awake late into the night.  One of the last things I try to do before
going to sleep is making a pass through the hold queue to delete spam
and to approve valid messages.  If it were later past 4am but still
very early then I would think it must be Karl because he is always
working in the early morning hours.  :-)

In any case I think that a delay of three hours and fifteen minutes
during the middle of the night is quite good.  Do all messages wait
that long?  Do some messages wait longer?  Do some go through quicker?
Yes to all.  The moderation team is a volunteer team and it is a best
effort from all involved.  But generally I think we do a good job of
handling messages quickly and efficiently so that the mailing lists
are usable and have a minimum of spam.

> > In mailman terminology, the message is "held for moderation", and
> > hopefully within a few hours or a day, a moderator approves the
> > message so it is sent to the list, and adds the user to a
> > whitelist so their future messages are not held for moderation.
> 
> So, are you saying that Colby just had bad luck that the moderator took
> more than a day?

Having looked up the timestamps and determined that this was a message
that came through in the middle of the US night and that it still only
waited 3h15m for approval then I think that is quite good.  But this
particular message was not delayed a day.  The message is a available
in the archive for anyone to look and verify this.

> I don't think that's a big deal.  But when I heard that there had
> been nothing posted there since the start of the month, that led me
> to suspect there was a bigger problem.

As far as I can tell the gnu-misc-discuss mailing list had only a
very, very few messages posted to it each month.  That is not an
indication that the list was not working.  It is an indication that
only a very few messages were sent there.  I think that is because so
much more discussion is happening to the (internal only) gnu-prog-discuss
list instead.

> Is the list working ok now?

Yes.  It looks to have been continuously working.  At the very least
it is operating actively now.

> Does the list simply have very light traffic?

Yes.  It has been a very low traffic mailing list.

In January it had a large increase in activity.  So far this month
there have been 24 messages posted there.  In all of December there
was one message.  None at all in October and November.  Only one in
July.  May had five.

> That's not a bad thing.  That list exists for people to vent against
> us, so we can say, "Please move this discussion to gnu-misc-discuss."
> For honesty's sake, we need to make sure it is working, but we don't
> complain if people don't use it.

I see very few complaints there.  Mostly it is general discussion.

Bob