Mailing list consolidation

The OBF’s self-hosted mailman server is still struggling right now, so we are looking at migrating the active mailing lists to paid hosting, and as part of this consolidating down to ideally about a dozen mailing lists. Currently we have a lot of mailing lists, but many are dormant or redundant.

Some were announcement specific, where nowadays blogs and Twitter work quite well. Others were development specific (including automatic commit logs from central source code repositories), but now most OBF Project discussions are on GitHub. While the main project mailing lists used to have a lot of user support traffic, much of that has moved to external Q&A style sites like BioStars, StackExchange, or StackOverflow. What this means is that the OBF software projects probably only need a single mailing list each.

Based on http://mailman.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo here are the current publicly listed OBF hosted mailing lists.

Miscellaneous active public lists (propose to retain in some form):

Miscellaneous active but non-public lists (propose to retain in some form):

BioPerl (propose to merge to a single list):

BioJava (propose to merge to a single list):

Biopython (propose to merge to a single list):

BioRuby (propose to merge to a single list):

BioSQL (propose to merge to a single list):

EMBOSS (propose to merge to a single list):

DAS (propose to merge to a single list, or close and archive):

Dormant lists, including legacy projects (propose to close and archive):

If this affects you directly (e.g. any project leaders we have not been able to contact yet), please write to the OBF board. Since mailman is currently unreliable, board at open-bio.org might not work. Please CC our fall back address of obf-board at Google Groups.

Update: Projects can also get in touch via this GitHub issue.


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