Mailing lists hosted on lochac.sca.org are managed by a piece of software known as Mailman. Lochac has been using Mailman2 successfully for many years but this version is no longer maintained by its developers. As a consequence, the Masonry Team will be migrating all mailing lists to Mailman3.
Due to the number of lists to be migrated and the complexity of the migration process, lists will be migrated one by one over the course of April and May 2022. Lists that are no longer in use may be retired rather than migrated. The points below set out what list members and administrators need to know about the change.
Migration
- Masonry will work with list administrators to set a time and date for migration of each list, and to communicate this to list members.
- The list will be unavailable for 30-60 minutes while its data is migrated from Mailman2 to Mailman3. Messages sent to the list during this period may be lost or bounced.
- The migration process will preserve the list membership and list archives, but the web interface will move to https://mailman.lochac.sca.org.
- Masonry will keep a backup of the Mailman2 list archives, which can be obtained by request.
For list members
- List members need not do anything to continue sending and receiving list e-mail.
- Instead of having a separate password for each list, list members can manage their settings for all lists by creating an account at https://mailman.lochac.sca.org.
- To access functions requiring a log-in, list members must create a new account even if already subscribed to one or more lists. The Mailman interface should automatically associate each new account with lists to which the e-mail address is subscribed.
- Mailman’s web interface allows list members to choose arbitrary usernames. Remember that these must be unique across the whole kingdom. Masonry may rename or revoke accounts with usernames that could be confused with an office, group, guild or order.
- List members can also manage their subscription by sending e-mail to
listname-request@lochac.sca.org, e.g.lochac-announce-request@lochac.sca.orgfor the Lochac Announce list. Send a message with subject ‘help’ for instructions. This doesn’t require an account.
For list administrators
- List administrators may change list settings, tend to moderation requests, etc. through their accounts at https://mailman.lochac.sca.org. There is no longer a separate password for list administration.
- Where the list administrator is a lochac.sca.org address like
officer@lochac.sca.orgorseneschal@group.lochac.sca.org, we suggest creating an account with username ‘officer’ or ‘group’ corresponding to this address. This account can then be passed on to future office-holders. - The Mailman3 site administrator is mailman3@lochac.sca.org. Please direct requests for new lists, enquiries about the list administrator interface, etc., to this address.
For webwrights
- After migration, links to Mailman2 pages like https://lochac.sca.org/mailman/listinfo/listname will no longer function. In Mailman3, the home page for a list is https://mailman.lochac.sca.org/postorius/lists/listname.lochac.sca.org, where listname is the name of the list.