Hi all,

I would like to make a suggestion here on how we can possibly make it better 
for people to use and follow our mailing-lists and hereby our project.

Admittedly I am interested in IoTDB unchanged. However, over time it has become 
more and more problematic to casually follow the project.

Subscribing to the dev-list, which should be the projects town-square, actually 
only helps if we’re doing a vote. Besides this, I can’t really see any 
discussions at all.

PR notifications have become so frequent, that we banned them to the “reviews@” 
list, to keep dev@ clean.
However, it’s so clean now, that it doesn’t contain anything except build 
success/failure notifications and the other list I think only archive-bots have 
subscribed (While dev@ currently has 277 email subscribers, reviews@ only has 3 
(at least one of them being the asf archiver and a second one being another 
mailbox archive outside of the asf)

How the reviews@ list looks like:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KEONRKhlnqL2azhhmpXBvRIjoyHapp--/view?usp=share_link
How the dev@ list looks like:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QxBMpdzv_LIa12CzpTBQOFE6HowIGBjq/view?usp=share_link

The problem I saw with GitHub PR notifications, was that they are unreadable in 
any normal email client also don’t I know a single email-client that can offer 
any sort of threading.
I did suggest some changes to the notification-bot the ASF uses and after quite 
a bit of discussion, they now added a feature, that a project can choose the 
format of the email subject.
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INFRA/Git+-+.asf.yaml+features#Git.asf.yamlfeatures-CustomsubjectlinesforGitHubevents

For PLC4X we changed it to this:
https://github.com/apache/plc4x/blob/develop/.asf.yaml#L62

This has the benefit of allowing people to see what a thread is about by making 
it start with the title … we all know what repo it’s gonna be about, so we 
moved that to the end (For some odd reason the repo is a required field in the 
subject)
By having every follow-up email be prefixed with “Re: “ every email client I 
tried, displayed it as a thread correctly.

So all in all we have changed in PLC4X:


  *   All dependabot stuff goes to commit@ (because nobody is actually 
interested in these emails)
  *   All PR and Issue emails go to dev, but with the updated format

Possibly worth thinking about updating the way we do it in iotdb.


Chris

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