Deprecating lists.swift.org

Swift mail service lists.swift.org will be turned off on April 22, 2020. All active email lists will be migrated over to forums.swift.org. We have already migrated archived emails from lists.swift.org to forums.swift.org when we introduced Swift forums. Unfortunately, the forums post linking lists.swift.org will be unreachable after April 22, 2020.

Email addresses migrating to forums.swift.org:

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Thanks for the heads-up. I have to say I would have appreciated a little more advance warning time than one day. I spent several hours yesterday manually migrating ~150 old lists.swift.org links to forums.swift.org, both on my public website and in my private notes. And I was lucky to notice this post in time.

I'm wondering if there is any chance to preserve existing URLs to lists.swift.org. We don't need an active Mailman installation, of course, but a static copy of the mailing list archives that preserves the existing URLs would be really useful. (Or a redirect to the new links at forums.swift.org, though I assume this would be difficult.)

According to my GitHub search, the apple/swift-evolution repository alone contains 196 links to lists.swift.org posts. These links often provide important context to old SE proposals (e.g. acceptance/rejection rationales, or links to the discussion threads).

And as far as I know, there's no easy way to derive the corresponding forums.swift.org URL from a lists.swift.org URL, so many (most?) of these links will be really hard to fix once the maling list archives are taken down.

I don't know how Mailman stores its archives. If the archives are already a bunch of static HTML pages, have you considered keeping just the archives online? If Mailman generates the archives dynamically, have you considered creating a mirror (using wget or something) of the archive pages and hosting the mirror at the existing URLs?

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I found this quote in a Mailman 2 to 3 migration guide:

If you need your URLs for Mailman 2 archives to work, you can keep the HTML files generated for the archives around and your web server configuration for the archives intact

This suggests that Mailman 2 does indeed generate static HTML files for its archives. I'd love it if you could keep these files online under their existing URLs so we don't break thousands of old links.

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We will look into this before shutting down lists.swift.org server. Thanks!

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I'm currently unable to connect to lists.swift.org. Did this move forward, or is there an outage?

@mishal_shah Could you clarify on this? There are lots of seemingly dead links throughout the Swift evolution repo right now, as Ole notes.

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Hi @Jumhyn,

It's back online, however we are planning on turning off the service.

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Thank you! Was there ever any decision on shutting down the mail service in a link-preserving way? It would really be a shame to break all historical links to mailing list threads across the web. :disappointed:

I don’t think we can count on most webmasters to be as attentive and dedicated as Ole.

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FWIW, I just began to update all lists.swift.org links in the swift-evolution repository to their respective forums URLs manually. I’ll send a PR when I’m done.

Regardless, I also think it would be a real shame to kill the old URLs. The effort to host static HTML versions of the list archives at their existing URLs does not seem insurmountable.

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Or some sort of proxy service which maps from the list links to the forums, which should be possible programmatically.

That would be ideal if it’s possible. My understanding was that it isn’t because there is no mapping between an email's message ID in the list archive and its corresponding Discourse forum post ID. But I’d love to be wrong.

My pull request is now up: [Gardening] Migrate lists.swift.org links to forums.swift.org. There were 536 links to lists.swift.org in the swift-evolution repo, now there are none.

One thing I noticed while going through all these old posts: it’s not that uncommon for a mailing list post to reference an earlier post by link. Some of those links point to the thread.gmane.org mirror that was a thing for a while, and those are already dead. It would be a pity to lose the ones to lists.swift.org as well.

In other words: by taking lists.swift.org offline, we’d not only kill links on other sites we have no control over, but also within our own archive.

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We have turned off the mailman server however, to avoid breaking links the static content will be available at https://lists.swift.org.

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That's great to hear. Thanks @mishal_shah.