Mailing List Capacity Reached! CRAP!

[Warren Togami]

Crap!!

For a while now I've been sitting here looking at the subscripion numbers of
LUAU and wondering why they haven't been increasing.  It has been this way
for MONTHS.

Now someone e-mails me saying that when he tried to subscribe, it bounced
back saying Lyris is at its subscription limit.  I am saddened by the amount
of lost subscribers we may have lost in this period, I estimate this number
to be nearly 70!

HI.NET is using the free version of Lyris to host the LUAU list that has a
certain number of user limit.  In order to go beyond this limit we must
either buy the pay version of Lyris or switch to another mailing list
manager software.

I personally say we should switch to the Mailman mailing list manager
package used very successfully by Red Hat and Gnome.  Ray Strode and I have
been managing Mailman on the new Linux server at the UH ICS Department for a
while now and we are very happy with it.  I much prefer Mailman over Lyris
because it has a much more friendly web based archive.  Mailman archives are
also searchable by Google, something Lyris cannot do.  In order to move from
Lyris to Mailman, we would need only to convert the mailing list archives
into mbox format and we would be good to go.  You can see an example of a
Mailman archive here:
https://listman.redhat.com/pipermail/ataraid-list/

Unless anyone is unhappy with this idea of moving from Lyris to Mailman, I
decree that it shall be done.  It is simply better than Lyris while being
Free and Open Source Software.

Now here is the main question, where should LUAU be hosted?  HI.NET has been
gracious for many years in hosting the mailing list for the community and we
thank them for it, but we now have the capacity to host it ourselves using
the University's bandwidth.  Such a move would remove the burden of hosting
from HI.NET, making it the community's responsibility.

Jay and anyone at HI.NET, how do you feel about this?  Would you be happy in
changing over to Mailman and continuing to host the list?  Have we been
burdening your company's resources?

Community, what do you want?

These changes must be done soon or we will continue to not have any new
subscribers.  Everyone please post your feelings on this issue.
Warren Togami
warren at togami.com

p.s. I will also put this out now.  I believe it may also be time to change
the name of the mailing list.  It annoys me to no end that people still keep
thinking LUAU is the local group and asking "When are the LUAU meetings?"
Yes some of you really hate this idea, so SPEAK UP and let your feelings be
known.