Re: Reply to list [was: Different key maps in different dired buffers]

[Dmitry Alexandrov]

Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> writes:

> Dmitry Alexandrov wrote:
>> >> ... seems to implicate the Stanford newsgroup gateway.
>> >
>> > I’ll try to post this message to ‘gnu.emacs.help‘ via a proper news
>> > server (news.gnus.org) and not with Gnus, let see what will happen.
>>
>> That is it!  References are broken.
>
> I think it is confirmed.
>
>> So what we could do with it, besides avoiding posting here via
>> ‘gnu.emacs.help’?
>
> That is the problem.  It is available.  People will use it.  We can't
> stop people from posting to the news group.

Well, being a listmaster, actually, you could, I guess.  I am not
familiar with GNU Mailman, but there must be sophisticated filtering
features.  But that would be too radical solution, of course.

Instead, I imagined, sending to anyone who posts via Usenet an
auto-reply mail that explains the problem and advises switching to Gmane
might be feasible as a temporary measure.

I’ve started to dig through GNU Mailman’s documentation (which seems to
be not ready yet) to find something about auto-responder and ran across
a note that Mailman has NNTP support on its own.

Then I’ve searched the Web a bit and found a page [0] which hints, that
usenet.stanford.org was blamed unfairly — it is a mere Usenet server,
while mail-to-news gating is done here, on gnu.org.

[0] https://www.gnu.org/usenet/usenet.html

Is that page still actual?

>> It would be logical to report this issue to the gateway maintainers (or
>> how else should be they called?) at Stanford, I have no idea though,
>> where to report to them to.
>
> Now that we have determined it to be the problem I guess we should
> contact them and see if they can address the problem somehow.  I don't
> know who maintains the gateway.  I have never had any interaction with
> them.
>
>> Or is it <listmaster@gnu.org>’s (is there any?) business to deal with
>> broken gateways?
>
> Well... I think that is me!

Nice to meet you, by the way.  :-)

> AFAIK the listmaster address is now untended.  AFAIK it was replaced
> with mailman@gnu.org for use with Mailman.  AFAIK (a lot of softening
> here) that happened around 2003 according to notes left behind in
> files so it has been a while.  Regardless of the actual history it
> predates my involvement by many years.  Which is why I have AFAIK so
> many times.
>
> These days the mailing list admins on the non-FSF side of things are
> myself and Karl.  Karl and I handle almost all of the mailing list day
> to day activity.  That includes all of the anti-spam and helping
> people with subscription and with large file problems and so forth.
> The FSF admins maintain the Mailman installation and Mailman upgrades.
> But they don't get involved in the day to day maintenance.
>
> And so you could write to mailman@gnu.org but that would just fall
> through to me or Karl at some point. :-) You could write to
> help-gnu-emacs-owner@gnu.org and that would reach the owners of this
> mailing list.  Which includes several other people in addition to
> myself and the -owner address is always a good thing to do when
> dealing with a specific mailing list.  Anyone of the group there could
> help.

Thank you for the details.

> Meanwhile, while investigating the listmaster address, I ran across
> another related untended mailbox that is 1.2G in size holding 71345
> messages piling up from 2006 that all appear to be spam.  Oh joy.
> Not! :-)
>
> In any case, I will try to chase down who is the maintainer of the
> Stanford news to mail gateway and contact them about the problem.  It
> has been this way for years.  It will probably take a while to get
> fixed.