Dear all,
this is to announce that we will a) discontinue the users mailing list and b) move the announcement mailing list to a different mailman instance. We will apply these changes end of this month, i.e. in 4 days. Details below.
a) We recently set up a self-hosted Discourse instance that can be reached at https://discourse.obspy.org/ (or as an alias at https://forum.obspy.org/). We think that this solution is a better replacement for discussion among users for various reasons, here are just a few:
- It is possible to edit posts/threads, e.g. make titles more meaningful, add tags for easier lookup of similar topics, group threads into fitting sub-categories for a better overview, …
- The power of markdown, enabling e.g. automatic syntax highlighting of code pieces, creating links while hiding ugly multiple lines of URLs, …
- Full control over what interactions will send out notification emails and when
- we can provide a space for discussion on smaller, obspy dependent projects, that other people can easily opt out of being notified about
- improved spam control
- …
Keeping the mailing list in parallel to the forum seems non ideal, since it will inevitably split up discussions and divide the attention of the community, so we decided to discontinue it and rather promote the new forum instead.
Joining the forum is easy, if you have a GitHub, Google or Twitter account, you can simply use one of these to log in, without setting up another password to remember. If you prefer to not use one of these however, you can create a dedicated account bound to an email address, too, of course.
Any comments on how to improve the forum or any question about using it? Please post them here.
b) We do realize that some people are only interested in major announcements (new releases etc.) and prefer to not have to look into how the discourse works, but rather prefer to have that as a low volume, read-only mailing list. With the aforementioned move of the community discussions to discourse, we decided to move the announcements mailing list over to the mailman infrastructure provided by the Python Software Foundation. This will take some burden off of us by not having to worry about mailman maintenance anymore. On August 1st, we will discontinue the old announcements mailing list and mass subscribe all email addresses that are subscribed to users and/or announcements at that point to the new announcements mailing list over at: https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/obspy.python.org/
If you do not want to get subscribed to the new announcements mailing list, you can simply unsubscribe from both current users/announcements mailing lists until July 31st.
All announcements will be on the forum too, so the new mailing list will simply be a mirror of the forum announcements category (where you even have the option to reply to announcements, e.g. asking about more details).
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in a reply below.
best,
Tobias