On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 09:41:18PM +0100, Julian Foad wrote:
> Branko Čibej wrote:
> > > > On 27.05.2020 19:30, Stefan Sperling wrote:
> > > > > Out of the blue, I have received nitpicking of changes I made to the
> > > > > website and the announce message I sent. I've received this feedback
> > > > > via the mailing list moderation mechanism.
> > > > >
> > > > > Can anyone tell me what's going on here? Who even wrote this?
> [...]
>
> Note the response was from moderators of announce.a.o not our own
> announce_at_s.a.o. They likely haven't seen this ensuing discussion on our
> dev@.
>
> > So, that anonymous moderator's complaint is doubly silly given that
> > there are currently 4 releases on dist/release and you can only have one
> > file named "KEYS" there. I'm pretty sure downstream users who use the
> > source release are intelligent enough to interpret "KEYS" as "*.KEYS" if
> > necessary.
>
> There is some history: the KEYS file issue was discussed between us and them
> somewhere (dev_at_community.a.o ?) a year or two ago but no consensus was
> reached. There is some ASF-wide policy they are trying to enforce. Clearly
> this isn't a good way to go about it.
>
> When I received similar rejections on some previous releases, I sighed and
> ignored them, thinking that reaching announce_at_a.o isn't that important and
> in each case it was the last thing at the end of a tiring day so I lacked
> the motivation to pursue it.
>
> - Julian
>
Thank you Julian. The possibility that such a message could originate
outside of our project's community didn't even occur to me! I misread
the moderation message and assumed it was moderation of our own
announce_at_s.a.o list.
Receiving such a message at the end of a long release preparation day is
indeed rather discouraging. Since this is recurring behaviour and can
potentially have toxic results in affected project communities, I think
we should document this in our release preparation guidelines to make the
release manager aware ahead of time about the possibility of receiving
moderation messages from annouce_at_a.o.
Index: releasing.part.html
===================================================================
--- releasing.part.html (revision 1878172)
+++ releasing.part.html (working copy)
@@ -1300,6 +1300,19 @@ Ensure that your mailer doesn't wrap the URLs over
<p>NOTE: We announce the release before updating the website since the website
update links to the release announcement sent to the announce@ mailing list.</p>
+<p>It is possible that your message to the ASF-wide announce_at_apache.org will
+be rejected. This generates a moderation notification with a Subject line
+such as: <tt>Returned post for announce_at_apache.org</tt>.
+The originator of such moderation messages is anonymous, which makes it
+impossible to have an actual conversation with the sender.
+If you receive such a moderation message please stay calm and forward it to
+Subversion's dev@ mailing list so the project can discuss whether anything
+needs to be done about it.
+In the past, this medoration mechanism was abused to alert the Subversion
+project about ASF-wide policy changes in the way the KEYS files are supposed
+to be handled. This is inappropriate because moderation is supposed to filter
+out spam. Policy changes should be discussed on the dev@ list instead.</p>
+
<p>Update the topics in various Subversion-related IRC channels, such as
<tt>#svn</tt> and <tt>#svn-dev</tt> on freenode.</p>
Received on 2020-05-28 07:59:52 CEST