Talk:Mailing lists/Wikimedia Announce

Ideas from list discussions

• push announcements automatically to foundation-l, other lists as recommended
• make 'reply to' go directly to Foundation-l?
• Use meta or other translation spaces to offer translation of announcements
• Offer one or two sentence 'mini' translations in English along with any non-English announcements
• archive it? Is there a way to easily push it to wiki and make the list RSS friendly?
• mods from staff and volunteer community
• replace chapters announce list w/ wikimedia announce
• all announcements have link to permanent on-wiki space (on foundation wiki for storage?)

JayWalsh 18:43, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't think that this list should replace mail:press-release, mail:chapters-reports and mail:announce-l: perhaps the list should be "subscribed" to those lists, or maybe we want to avoid such cross-posting? --Nemo 09:03, 2 May 2010 (UTC)

Automatic forwarding to Wikimedia-l

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T115300

As discussed in detail on Bugzilla:46022, the automatic forwarding of all messages posted to Wikimediaanounce-l to Wikimedia-l was set up in 2011 (by adding the then list address foundation-llists.wikimedia.org to the Wikimediaanounce-l subscribers list), and it is generally working fine. However, every now and then messages don't get forwarded, and I though we should start tracking them here so that we can identify possible reasons and fix it. I just compared the archives of all messages posted to both lists so far this month [1] [2]. The WikimediaAnnounce-l archive for June currently contains 22 messages, 20 of which made it fine to Wikimedia-l as well. (About three of those appear to have been sent directly to Wikimedia-l too, so they appear without the double prefix "[Wikimedia-l] [Wikimedia Announcements]" in the Wikimedia-l archive; it seems that Mailman filters out duplicate messages.) The two where the forwarding didn't work are listed below.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 18:58, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

• "[Wikimedia Announcements] WMIT bulletin no. 53 - May 29, 2013" [3], sent by .mau. (maurizio codogno) on June 13, 2013 (plaintext)
• "[Wikimedia Announcements] Election results [4]", sent by Philippe Beaudette on June 25, 2013 (HTML email)
• "[Wikimedia Announcements] Amical Wikimedia Report, May 2013" [5], sent by David Parreño Mont on July 2, 2013 (HTML email)

(please expand)

The second message was repeated to the list, see http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2013-June/126727.html

The first message may not have been as wikimediaannounce-l was not in the 'Alias names (regexps) which qualify as explicit to or cc destination names for this list.'. I added it a few days ago as I saw no reason to have to moderate it....

Regards, Ariconte (talk) 23:46, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Interesting, does that mean that all the forwarded messages had to moderated manually earlier? Then maybe some of those missing forwards were moderation accidents? In any case, thanks for taking care of that. As described in the linked Bugzilla comments, I was under the impression that WikimediaAnnounce-llists.wikimedia.org had already been added to the "List of non-member addresses whose postings should be automatically accepted" on the "Privacy options/[Sender filters]" subpage (should be here).

Regarding the second message, I was pretty sure I had not seen the Wikimedia-l copy in the online archive, nor in my Gmail inbox (and somebody else had observed the same this morning), but as you say it's clear there now in the online archive at least (with the running number in the URL, 126727, matching those posted around the same time, so it also does not seem to be a case of delayed publication).

Let's hope that everything works fine from now on, and track further exceptions here. Thanks!

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 01:35, 26 June 2013 (UTC)

New example (reported by Pine): This posting is not yet visible in the Wikimedia-l archives at this point. (Just leaving this here without being able to investigate further myself - this list is no longer in my bailiwick as I have moved on to another team at the Foundation and only stayed on to support the list's current masters as a backup admin.) Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 06:13, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Added some current examples from August and September to phab:T115300. Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 03:18, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

Unused

There is a pattern of people sending announcements to wikimedia-l only. Examples from the current month include [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]. Nobody bothers to forward the emails to WikimediaAnnounce-l, either. How to fix? Perhaps the list should be made unmoderated so that people see an immediate benefit in using it; it has way less subscribers than wikimedia-l anyway, it may be silly to "protect" it more.

Alternatively, we may tell people to subscribe to the new threads feed of wikimedia-l (or even post it automatically to this list). --Nemo 10:54, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

Nemo - Thanks for pointing this out. I have asked WMF to post announcements to the announce list and will write a note for the Wikimedia-l list. Regards, Ariconte (talk) 01:01, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

For those not familiar with the technical setup: The list receives a huge amount of spam and misdirectes replies from subscribers (those whose mail clients ignores to Reply-to which is set to Wikimedia-l, and send the reply to the origin list instead), so it's not possible to make it unmoderated.

Luckily your advice to send people to a non-WMF site instead was not followed - Gmane appears to have gone offline for good now, and its assets may end up with a commercial company of unknown trustworthiness.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 03:29, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

Submissions rejected

My message was automatically rejected, so the advice on the page appears to be incorrect:

You are not allowed to post to this mailing list, and your message has been automatically rejected. If you think that your messages are being rejected in error, contact the mailing list owner at wikimediaannounce-l-owner@lists.wikimedia.org.

--Nemo 17:09, 14 December 2017 (UTC)