Re: [orca-list] Announcement: this mailing list will be retired by the end of Oct 2022

[Kyle <kyle free2 ml>]

John G. Heim shared the following:
> I have a problem with us changing course  while Joanie is on vacation. 
> Last I saw was that she asked Samuel to create a list on debian.org.


This is exactly why I have not yet subscribed to any of the new lists. 
Joanie did specifically ask Samuel about hosting the list at Debian, 
although none of us at the time were aware that getting it set up could 
take a prohibitive amount of time due to a backlog of queued requests. 
Still, because Joanie is still on vacation, we haven't heard from her in 
response to this development, so there is no way to know at this time 
where Orca's lead developer is going to hang out once her vacation ends. 
In addition, although Tuxfamily appears to have been up and running 
consistently since 2005, they have experienced two devastating power 
outages in just over the past two months, and any and all web services 
related to their email lists seem to have been down for nearly a week, 
and are possibly getting even worse. I remember seeing Orca listed just 
a few days ago, but now their latest project header displays only a 
bullet with the single word "Woops!" underneath it, and 
lists.tuxfamily.org just displays a very minimalist 503 error page. 
Whether we want a web forum style interface to the list or not, whether 
we feel that a web-based subscription management interface is a 
must-have, a nice-to-have or completely unnecessary, this does not bode 
well for a searchable list archive, which I think we can all agree is 
quite necessary. As things stand now, it may be better to brave the 
uncharted waters of Discourse, along with its new terminology of 
categories, tags and topics, and to report any issues we find that make 
it difficult to use, both on the web and via email. This at least has 
the potential to make Discourse the best email list and web forum 
software on the planet, and that is good for everyone, since it is free 
and open source, just like our beloved screen reader, desktop 
environments and operating system.

~Kyle