GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 650662
Need to renew mails + automatic subscription to foundation-list/announce mailing lists is badly broken
Last modified: 2012-02-20 12:20:06 UTC
Hi, we received some reports about some important stuff being broken in Mango, specifically: - need to renew mails that are usually sent one-two months before a Foundation membership is going to expire are not sent anymore. This is a *serious* problem since it will take the member to not renew his membership and therefore losing it without receiving a single notification. - automatic subscriptions to foundation-list/announce mailing list that should happen anytime a renewal takes place is badly broken as well, this mean that most of the people not subscribed to those list will lose all the important mails at elections time for example. (i.e candicacies, discussions between candidates etc) Please consider this as an important issue. I am here for anything you might need or want me to do to fix this situation.
I don't think any of that functionality is in the mango module to be honest. 1. IIRC this was handled by a different script 2. I thought this was manual? Could you ask an old time membership committee person how this was done? Or perhaps an email to see where it was sent from? I'm pretty sure the sending hostname is not button.gnome.org.
1. I think it was handled by a different script as well. 2. I am pretty sure this was an automatic consequence of having a membership renewed, but again I don't know what or how this was handled. I will get in contact with Tobias so that he can reply back and give us a bit more context. (CCing him now)
The mailing was done by a script from Baris. Apparently, it doesn't work anymore. It used to write its output to /home/users/bcicek/public_html/renewal.log. I have reimplented the script in Python and I will run the cronjob from July. Feel free to remind me. The script will hit the foundation-web git module soon unless I get told a better place to store it. As for the subscription: I have the feeling that exporting a list of members every other month and bulk subscribe them on foundation-announce is the most pragmatic solution. However, we ask the people to subscribe to foundation-announce, once they obtain a (renewed) membership, don't we? In that case, I don't think we necessarily need to actively subscribe them. Imagine somebody that did not subscribe or did unsubscribe on purpose. I consider forcefully subscribing that person to be rude. Hence: Let's check whether we ask the people which obtained a membership. If so, let's do nothing. If we don't, let's do it.
Awesome Tobias, about #1 I'll remember you to start running it within the end of the current elections. About #2, we do actually use these two form letters: 1. http://git.gnome.org/browse/mango/tree/www/renewal-template.txt 2. http://git.gnome.org/browse/mango/tree/www/approval-template.txt as per 2. it would be nice to have the *new* member to be automatically subscribed to foundation-announce, not sure for the renewal though. (I think this shouldnt be needed for people renewing, if they ever unsubscribed from there, there is no point in subscribing them again as you correctly pointed out) so there are two ways of fixing this: 1. we get admin access on foundation-list/announce lists and we manually subscribe *new* members (this is what alwais happened since the old wiki pages [1] required every Membership Committee member to have admin status on both the mailing lists above, this explains why) 2. we change the form letters suggesting the member to subscribe himself on foundation-announce, where all the major GNOME announcements are sent. I would personally like to go for 1. it's a bit more work for the Committee, but really adding a new member to a mailing list is a one minute duty. [1] https://live.gnome.org/MembershipCommittee/Accesses
Me and Tobias discussed this issue a bit on IRC and there is a third valid solution which is writing a little script that should use the add_member's mailman console command having a text file as input. (it should write the new member's e-mail on the file and clean it up every day with a cronjob) This should happen with *new* members only, while renewals shouldnt be considered as explained above. More opinions are very welcome as well.
We can put something in cron on the mail.gnome.org machine. E.g. automatically subscribe all persons who have their initial foundation application since the last 24 hours. We could put that in sysadmin-bin module, see the mail directory there.
Ideally, we should have a new field in the database, a boolean defaulting to off saying if the member was subscribed already.
Everything in place now. Automatic renewals notifications: http://git.gnome.org/browse/foundation-web/tree/bin/get_renewees.py Automatic foundation-list/announce subscriptions for new members: http://git.gnome.org/browse/sysadmin-bin/tree/mail/automatic_subscriptions