Re: Request with regard to a gnu-hosted mailing list

[Bob Proulx]

Hello Valentin,

Valentin Villenave wrote:
> The list address@hidden has two administrators listed:
> 
> address@hidden,
> address@hidden
> 
> Unfortunately, the first one of these addresses is no longer active
> (as far as I can see, it hasn't been used in the past nine years; its
> owner used to be reached at a gmail address, but has sadly become
> altogether unreachable for the past five years).

Sorry to hear the loss of a person there.  I think that means we
should remove that address from the owner list.  I will BCC that
address on this message just in case it goes through but in the BCC so
that later replies won't get bounces.  I expect to see a bounce from
that address.

I have removed that address from the owner list for that mailing list
in order to tidy up and keep the list accurate.

> If I remember correctly, I always was a moderator and not an owner of
> the list;

Actually the reverse.  You are listed as an owner not a moderator.
Another address address@hidden is listed as a moderator.

Mailman (very unfortunately in my opinion) sends all moderation
messages both to the moderators and to the owner.  When listed as an
owner you cannot avoid the moderator messages.  (You can only filter
them out.)

> at any rate, I seem to be unable to access the admin pages:
> https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/admin/lilypond-user-fr

I can reset the list password.  I will send it to you directly in a
different message.

> Although we've been functioning like that for several years now,
> leaving a list without any admin doesn't seem wise in the long run
> (ideally, I should even assemble a team to make it more sustainable).
> Is there someone who could give us a hand here?

Actually there is.  Seperate from the moderation side of the mailing
list operations is the "listhelper" team.  This is a group of us that
volunteer over the majority of the mailing lists.  We use
address@hidden as a generic catch-all address for most
of the 1,500+ mailing lists at lists.gnu.org.

If you want we will happily change the lilypond-user-fr-owner address
to address@hidden and then we would help to handle the
normal mail there.  Normal mail to that address is usually
subscription and unsubscription requests.  Also general mail problems
when people say they are having delivery problems.  I would move your
address into the moderator field and you would still get all of the
moderator messages.  This does not effect your ability to log in and
do other management of the mailing list as that is separate and not
tied to mail addresses but just the password.

A negative of this is that most people having problems and sending
email to the -fr-owner address would presumably be communicating in
French and none of us currently on the listhelper team speak French.
However in that case if I could not resolve the issue I would simply
get you involved to help.

For English speaking mailing lists the general operating practices are
to use the listhelper configuration documented in some detail here.

  https://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/ListHelperAntiSpam/

Unfortunately the process has resources for SpamAssassin's Bayes
engine primarily for English speaking lists.  I keep wanting to
implement a separate Bayes engine configuration for separate databases
for different languages but it hasn't happened yet.  Therefore it
works well for the English language lists but terrible for other
languages.  Therefore we don't currently pass other languages through
the SpamAssassin Bayes anti-spam robot.  Which means that for the
lilypond-user-fr it still needs French communicating moderators.

Bob