Does anybody know anything about https://librelist.com/ for hosted Mailman lists? If this is a reliable service it seems tailor made for this group. For the rest (website, forms/surveys, shareable calendar) you can pretty easily get a managed Wordpress (Namecheap is $66/year for example), but in my (limited) experience, hosting providers that offer managed Wordpress often don't want to handle email discussion lists. Cheers, Erica ------- Original Message ------- On Wednesday, November 30th, 2022 at 11:30 AM, Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 5:03 AM ac via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
to admin a vps or two with apache/nginx and mailman with a fewthousand? subscribers is, imnsho, not a major thing and in terms ofvps costs is maybe like 10 bucks a month (for two vps) if even two isreally needed
The issue is not the server or its cost, but the care and feeding of web services:
- Email (multiple lists) - Aliases
- Forms and surveys (*) - Website - Shareable calendar (*)
The ones marked with (*) We would LIKE to do but don't yet have the tools and/or time and/or smarts to do.
I have been on the mailing list for ten? years now and I do notremember any month where gtalug had any volume that exceeds what a fivebucks per month vps can carry and a properly configured mailman (whichis very mature and can be battle hardened)
We've had some very smart people running mailman and it still doesn't work to anyone's satisfaction. Or maybe it's our SMTP server, I don't know which one it is.
The existing people on the Board have just become exhausted and the volunteers with the tech skills and keys to everything aren't always reachable. As volunteers I don't expect immediate tech support, but it just makes the process of constant firefighting more than we are prepared to bear.
cannot take more than anhour or two per month to admin.
I can only tell you that this is nowhere near the effort required, which is an insane amount of effort required for a small group like ours.
Anything we host ourselves bears both admin resources and financial hosting cost. Right now we're using mailman and frankly, I see the bounce messages and it's almost impossible to keep track of. (Hint: I tried mailing this Sunday night but that bounced). I really don't like mailman anymore. There are better ways to filter spam.
if your own email to mailman is bouncing, this is probably not what you think it is :)
It probably isn't. But I'm tired of running after other people to diagnose.
That said, I'm in no position to guarantee anything.
and this sentence is the crux of it. personally I do not trust google.
I can't guarantee that I'll be alive tomorrow, either.
There is no reason to believe that Google for Nonprofits is going away any time this decade, and if there is I'd love to hear it. If they tried it, the outcry from the charitable world would be deafening. There are many reasons and ways to mistrust Google; this isn't one of them.
it would be far easier to pay 10 bucks and get three sysadmins to eachdonate an hour a month (and their scripts :) )
That's the whole point of this conversation. We're already paying a nominal hosting fee and have volunteer sysadmins and things are still constantly borked.
IT IS NOT EASIER, let alone FAR easier, our real-world experience to date bears that out.
so, if you decide to continue having an emailing list and self hostedservices I would gladly donate some of my time (at least fourhours a month [...]
If all we had to do is threaten to move services to Google in order to get more people to volunteer, we could have done that ages ago. We're well past that. Your four hours a month are still very much valued, but we need that energy for more things than just keeping things running -- especially when we have an offer, at no cost, of commercial-grade online services.
providing that there is at least one (or two) otherhigh/senior skill dev/sys/ops also?
See? Every volunteer effort comes with strings and limitations. So does mine. So does that for everyone else on the Board. A group this small should not need to be spending so much of its behind-the-scenes energy just herding cats. There's too much else to do that isn't being done just so we can keep the virtual lights on. - Evan