hi DAn, all,
I may have an interesting perspective to share (though I'll leave you, dear reader, to make that value judgment). After careful consideration, I migrated the
ISMIR community mailing list in 2013 to Google Groups.
If I recall correctly, there are, at a high level, a few options to operating a list like this:
- Pay a mailing list provider (MailChimp, ...)
- Run a mail server on
- a VM you pay for from a hosting provider (GoDaddy, Hostgator, ...)
- a physical machine someone owns (volunteer X, University Y)
- Use a free service on the internet (Google Groups, Github, ...)
I had a few constraints:
- I was a PhD student and didn't have the bandwidth to sys-admin it (turns out, I still don't).
- I was more concerned about centralizing risk in a single person than a single entity, and wanted to decouple the technical (access, operation) from the human (responsibility, time). People quit (or get fired), go on vacation, change jobs / careers, etc ... and it's not fair to them (or the group) that their affiliations become a sticking point in running the thing, or leaving it behind for someone else to deal with.
- I assumed we had zero revenue. While ISMIR has a conference component, which could help, I didn't want to bank on it as a funding source.
And I had opinions:
- We had been using Sympa. At the time, it felt rather retro (though in digging up this link, the new version looks quite modern), and if we were going to be disrupted, it seemed like a good time to modernize.
- I wanted to make account management easier for users. People play musical chairs with affiliations (one person ends up with four email addresses over a decade), and it seemed like no one could change their password / see how they were signed up.
- I wanted a searchable webview. This helps with inclusivity, because new people can catch up on old threads. The previous webview wasn't great, and I'm not even sure you could search.
Taking all of this together (in 2013), I ended up at Google Groups. And, after five-going-on-six years, it's been really positive on the whole:
- No one ever noticed / complained. I really worried about this, but it functions like a mailing list for those who want a list, and others can opt in to the bells and whistles.
- No management. No downtime. It's been pretty much set it and forget it.
- I've personally only used it a handful of times, but good search is invaluable. It has been a massive time-saver, and I've heard that it's been helpful for folks who weren't on the list years ago.
- Spam protection! I didn't see this coming, but the built-in filter is pretty great.
Here's what kinda stinks about it.
- I managed the migration myself, and this was a week+ of personal misery. Bulk adds of addresses are not easy, for obvious reasons: they want to limit spam abuse. I moved over 2k addresses over, and after all of that, a bunch of them were stale. I wish 100 times over that I had said, "we're moving! come with, or don't!" and left it at that. On a related note...
- I am (or at least was) worried about number of people on the list. This is not the solution for 1M person lists. That said, while I wish this was a problem music and audio groups had, this didn't really apply to us, and I don't think we've every had an issue (call this one a push)
- I meant to migrate the archives, but never did... but no one's complained about this either.
- Some users still don't know / understand how to manage their own accounts. I get a few pings a year asking for help, but it's definitely under 1% of users / traffic, whichever way you want to count.
Still here? I guess I've a parting thought or two as well.
- I was (and maybe am) worried about the "What if Google shuts down Groups / starts charging money / builds robots for the military / etc?" There are three things that have helped me sleep at night, but of course ymmv:
- We've already migrated once, and the process is documented. If we had to do it again, it'd be easier, and we already know our options. Member list exports are offered by Google Groups.
- We have to use something, and a doomsday scenario for Groups hasn't happened yet. In contrast, other options actively cost money, and I (personally) have been at three different institutions in this time frame. The spectre of negatives has been more than outweighed by tangible negatives (and positives!).
- Unlike Google plus / wave / buzz / other past experiments, a lot of people use Google Groups. Not as many as GMail or search, but it's included in the G Suite and, if I'm not mistaken, I think it drives their help forums. Groups appears to be as stable as anything might be on the Internet. I love (love) GitHub, and it'll be inside the Microsoft ecosystem soon pending review.
- List admin is a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it ... and I can't even begin to describe how great a fully managed system is. It might seem like "install X on a machine" is easy, but between bots / hackers / system upgrades / university technical constraints & penchant for bureaucracy ... keeping a list up and running can be death by a thousand paper cuts.
I hope this recap has been helpful. It was for me, and maybe I'll migrate this to a blogpost or something. Thanks for reading, I'll go back to lurking now. :o)
best,
e