Hi Erica. On Wed, Nov 30, 2022 at 3:06 PM Erica Peterson <epeterson@protonmail.com> wrote:
Does anybody know anything about https://librelist.com/ for hosted Mailman lists?
That would be great to know, because the librelist.com website doesn't itself seem to know this. The main page says what it is but there are no links to use the service or get more info. Looking at the site map gives me links to ... types of 55 gallon drums <https://librelist.com/articles1.html> ? If this is a reliable service it seems tailor made for this group.
The latest article I can find on the service is more than a decade old. It was a one-person operation <https://github.com/zedshaw/librelist> that, even when operating, did not have ease of use as a priority <https://kurtraschke.com/2010/10/librelist-ideology-trumps-usability>. Maybe it still operates but you need to learn the secret handshake. I have no patience for such games. I would not consider this reliable.
For the rest (website, forms/surveys, shareable calendar) you can pretty easily get a managed Wordpress (Namecheap is $66/year for example)
Not quite. The managed service usually gets you barebones Wordpress. Posts and pages. Things like forms <https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/best-wordpress-survey-plugins-compared/> and calendars <https://wpbuffs.com/wordpress-calendar-plugins/> usually require third-party plugins of assorted quality which we would be solely responsible for choosing, installing and administering. I have far more fear of WordPress module authors losing interest (which *has* badly burned me in the past) than I have in Google discontinuing its nonprofit program. In other words, "pretty easily" is ... subjective. but in my (limited) experience, hosting providers that offer managed
Wordpress often don't want to handle email discussion lists.
There's a good reason for that ;-). Let's face it. Email discussion lists are legacy. They're cumbersome and fighting a never-ending battle with spammers and phishers. The main server software choices in current use are listserv (36 years old and proprietary) or mailman (23 years old and FOSS), and you gotta find a host and suitable admins. Plus we still need to maintain an SMTP server, along with anti-spam tools such as RBL hooks which only add more complexity. As a result, most third-party providers of list-based email services these days are one-directional and campaign-based (ie Mailchimp), sources of spam rather than fighters of it. I know very few people younger than 40 for whom email is a preferred means to engage in discussion. GTALUG has been experimenting with other tools such as a presence on Discord, but email remains the preferred tool of people here for reasons I can best ascribe to inertia. That's OK, but the effort to tame this email beast, in its current form, is too much to bear for our limited resources. (If I had my way we'd be a series of group chats on Signal). Google offers a path for continuing to use email lists that we can live with. - Evan