739655 - dev-identity Web interface is broken

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(mozilla.org Graveyard :: Server Operations, task)

Description

[Dan Mills [:thunder]]

In the past two weeks I've heard three reports of people who have tried to use the Google groups interface to subscribe & post to the dev-identity list (which doesn't work). In two cases, they didn't figure it out and just gave up. The third person did figure out that you need to use the mailman interface (not sure how - via the wiki I guess), but was obviously (and understandably) confused:

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.identity/cap3oFrJykE/discussion

The current situation is *completely* unacceptable.

Comment 1

[Michael Burns [:mburns]]

We have had trouble communicating with Google Groups admins, but at the moment, seems appear to be cross-posting and functioning correctly.

As mentioned in that thread, This Discussion Forum is accessible from Mailman (SMTP), NNTP (news.mozilla.org) and via the web(+nntp) at Google Groups.

You should only need to be subscribed to any one medium, and posts will correctly propagate to all others.

That being said, Posting directly to Mailman or even news.m.o has recently been more reliable than Google Groups, anecdotally.

Comment 2

[Dan Mills [:thunder]]

I don't trust the system to be reliable, and we have plenty of anecdotal evidence that it's not. It's never really been reliable, either, I've seen problems of this sort for _years_.

Comment 3

[David Illsley]

I wonder if there's any interest in developing/running a mozilla-hosted web interface? NNTP looks to be pretty simple, and browserid itself provides the e-mail ownership checking that'd be key to allowing posting.

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

David: there may well be interest, but there isn't (as far as we know) sufficiently good software. 

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Discussion_Forums/Problem_Statement

Gerv

Comment 5

[Michael Burns [:mburns]]

Mailman3, now in  beta, has the infrastructure to also support NNTP, which (if developed) could fill the requirements of of web, news + email bi-directional read-write mediums. It  even supports browserID, which is all kinds of awesome.

But, while Mailman has support for these border server modules for nntp, doesn't look like any public development has happened. One of the devs has said it was planned by 3.0 or 3.1 'at the latest'.

http://grokbase.com/t/python/mailman-developers/1089pqryn7/mm3-nntp-support

Fingers crossed.

Comment 6

[Lawrence Mandel [:lmandel] (use needinfo)]

This looks to be fixed.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/mozilla.dev.identity