On Thu, May 28, 2020 at 07:59:48AM +0200, Stefan Sperling wrote:
> 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.
Updated wording after having read Daniel's post, which mentioned that
moderators could in fact sign their name on rejection messages to avoid
at least the anonymity aspect of the issue.
Index: releasing.part.html
===================================================================
--- releasing.part.html (revision 1878172)
+++ releasing.part.html (working copy)
@@ -1300,6 +1300,20 @@ 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 if the moderator
+neglects to sign the moderation message with their own name, which makes it
+impossible to have an actual conversation with the moderator.
+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 08:07:25 CEST