ROS SIG Migration Method

Site Feedback
1

As we look at migrating SIGs from google groups to here on discourse I’d like to suggest we use this thread to develop best practices.

  1. At first we can propose a new category for the SIG here in the Site Feedback category.
  2. Once approved an admin will setup the category
  3. The welcome message should be updated and pinned
  4. For backwards compatibility a user can be created to watch the new category and email to the old mailing list.
  • At the moment the best approach I’ve found is to create a user with the email of the mailing list and subscribe them. I have not found the ability to have a generic user subscribe with a specific email to a specific category.
  • Note setup the user to watch the category
  • Uncheck the option “mailing list mode” as that will send an email for every topic regardless.
  • When you create the user, put the mailing list into full moderation and catch the registration email in the moderation queue.
  1. The old mailing list should disable posting (except for the above user) to avoid conversations being split.
  • The information on the old mailing list should be updated to point people to the new discourse category, including the mailing list description, bounce notifications, and footers of published data.
  • Potentially new subscriptions should be disabled to the mailing list. And a timeline set for ending republishing contents to the mailing list.
  1. It would be great to import past conversations. It’s a pain from google groups. There are several threads about this such as: https://meta.discourse.org/t/import-from-google-groups-to-discourse/7307/6 However if we keep the old groups online in read only mode I"m not sure how much effort it’s worth to try to import the whole history. Depending on the mailing list being converted it may or may not be worth it.
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