On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 09:41:18PM +0100, Julian Foad wrote: > Branko Čibej wrote: > > > > On 27.05.2020 19:30, Stefan Sperling wrote: > > > > > Out of the blue, I have received nitpicking of changes I made to the > > > > > website and the announce message I sent. I've received this feedback > > > > > via the mailing list moderation mechanism. > > > > > > > > > > Can anyone tell me what's going on here? Who even wrote this? > [...] > > Note the response was from moderators of announce.a.o not our own > announce@s.a.o. They likely haven't seen this ensuing discussion on our > dev@. > > > So, that anonymous moderator's complaint is doubly silly given that > > there are currently 4 releases on dist/release and you can only have one > > file named "KEYS" there. I'm pretty sure downstream users who use the > > source release are intelligent enough to interpret "KEYS" as "*.KEYS" if > > necessary. > > There is some history: the KEYS file issue was discussed between us and them > somewhere (dev@community.a.o ?) a year or two ago but no consensus was > reached. There is some ASF-wide policy they are trying to enforce. Clearly > this isn't a good way to go about it. > > When I received similar rejections on some previous releases, I sighed and > ignored them, thinking that reaching announce@a.o isn't that important and > in each case it was the last thing at the end of a tiring day so I lacked > the motivation to pursue it. > > - Julian >
Thank you Julian. The possibility that such a message could originate outside of our project's community didn't even occur to me! I misread the moderation message and assumed it was moderation of our own announce@s.a.o list. Receiving such a message at the end of a long release preparation day is indeed rather discouraging. Since this is recurring behaviour and can potentially have toxic results in affected project communities, I think we should document this in our release preparation guidelines to make the release manager aware ahead of time about the possibility of receiving moderation messages from annouce@a.o. Index: releasing.part.html =================================================================== --- releasing.part.html (revision 1878172) +++ releasing.part.html (working copy) @@ -1300,6 +1300,19 @@ Ensure that your mailer doesn't wrap the URLs over <p>NOTE: We announce the release before updating the website since the website update links to the release announcement sent to the announce@ mailing list.</p> +<p>It is possible that your message to the ASF-wide annou...@apache.org will +be rejected. This generates a moderation notification with a Subject line +such as: <tt>Returned post for annou...@apache.org</tt>. +The originator of such moderation messages is anonymous, which makes it +impossible to have an actual conversation with the sender. +If you receive such a moderation message please stay calm and forward it to +Subversion's dev@ mailing list so the project can discuss whether anything +needs to be done about it. +In the past, this medoration mechanism was abused to alert the Subversion +project about ASF-wide policy changes in the way the KEYS files are supposed +to be handled. This is inappropriate because moderation is supposed to filter +out spam. Policy changes should be discussed on the dev@ list instead.</p> + <p>Update the topics in various Subversion-related IRC channels, such as <tt>#svn</tt> and <tt>#svn-dev</tt> on freenode.</p>