Google Groups contingency plan

[Tom Forbes]

Hello,

Given the recent worldwide situation I’ve found myself thinking a lot about contingency plans recently. I wanted to raise a question about our reliance on Google Groups and if we had any contingency plans if this service was shut down?

To put it politely, it's pretty obvious that Google Groups is in “maintenance mode” and there is little, if any, active development. Alongside this:

1. Google has apparently broken core functionality like advanced searching, and left it broken for years at a time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Groups#Google_Groups)

2. Google itself has shut down down maintenance-mode services before even if they have an active user base (see Google Reader)

3. Google Groups clearly doesn’t bring any revenue to Google at all, and is probably a legal liability.

Given this, if we have not already we should maybe consider what we would do if it was announced tomorrow that Google Groups was shutting down in 3 to 6 months?

Perhaps we’ve already considered this but I couldn’t find any discussions about this (and it’s hard to search for threads that reference “Google Groups” as every thread contains that string!). Some food for thought: the Python development mailing lists (i.e https://mail.python.org/archives/list/pytho...@python.org/) are browsable through a service called HyperKitty (https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty), which is built with Django. We could potentially ask for a mailing list on the python.org mail server or we could host HyperKitty and MailMan ourselves?

[אורי‎]

I think python.org and Django are managed by different (legal) entities so it doesn't make sense for Django mailing lists to use the domain name python.org. Actually as far as I see it, we only need mailing lists and don't need any web interface features we get from Google Groups. Personally my email is powered by Google which is like Gmail and I assign labels per mailing list, so if I want to search I can just type text and the label name and I can see any messages since I joined the mailing lists (I never delete messages). I think if, if Google will close Google Groups they will give us at least a few months notice and then we can discuss it, why do we have to worry about it now? But just in case, I think running a (free software & open source) mailing list software on a specific server will do, something similar to what python.org is doing but not using their domain name (unless Django becomes parts of the python.org legal entity).

By the way, is Django a commercial entity? Why does it use the .com domain suffix? Python uses .org, but doesn't Django use .org too? From reading the website I see that the Django Software Foundation is non-profit.

[אורי‎]

‪On Sun, Apr 26, 2020 at 7:34 PM ‫אורי‬‎ <u...@speedy.net> wrote:‬

By the way, is Django a commercial entity? Why does it use the .com domain suffix? Python uses .org, but doesn't Django use .org too? From reading the website I see that the Django Software Foundation is non-profit.

Sorry, I meant:  Python uses .org, why doesn't Django use .org too?  

[Tom Forbes]

I think python.org and Django are managed by different (legal) entities so it doesn't make sense for Django mailing lists to use the domain name python.org

That’s a good point, it was just an idea. However running mailserver can be annoying and there are economies of scale when it comes to security, spam filtering and ease of administration. We could potentially have a django.com mailing list address that points at a mailsever managed by python.org, and other projects like scikit have their mailing lists hosted by them. 

Actually as far as I see it, we only need mailing lists and don't need any web interface features we get from Google Groups

We certainly do need it, if only for historic searching. User management and other niceties are great to have as well.

why do we have to worry about it now

I mean, it’s a contingency plan. More of a contingency discussion actually. The point is to discuss future events before they happen. If the result is “it’s not worth thinking about now, let's decide when/if we get there” then that’s valid outcome.

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[Abayomi Oloko]

Hello Tom,

I must commend your great foresight as we may be robbed of not only the rich content of our email communication history, our mailing list may also not be available. 

My suggestion will be for us to look in the direction of something open source as a stop gap between the time that we may agree to move and the time we have completed deliberations, business case analysis and decisions on the way forward.

Sent from my iPhone

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[Adam Johnson]

 I think python.org and Django are managed by different (legal) entities so it doesn't make sense for Django mailing lists to use the domain name python.org

I think it's fine to share with them, if possible.  As Tom, says other projects like scikit do.

Tom - you didn't mention backing up the archives. I had a search and it seems there's no official tool, but there is a script here: https://geek.co.il/2018/05/16/migrating-google-groups-archives-between-accounts . I think having a trial run ofthis would be a good first step to knowing where we're at with preserving the data.

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Adam

[Tom Forbes]

Actually, after taking a look I found that there is actually a new version of Groups that is in beta (https://support.google.com/a/answer/9687393?hl=en&ref_topic=14869). It seems they are more tightly integrating it with G-Suite, and targeting it towards schools and businesses rather than public mailing lists/usenet archives. 

Some features are potentially being deprecated (https://support.google.com/a/answer/9687393?hl=en&ref_topic=14869#deprecated), but I don’t think we use any of those.

I’m glad that Groups isn’t going to die, and I guess perhaps it makes this thread redundant, but the lack of an easy export is troubling and unexpected. Perhaps with the new release it might be possible without resorting to screen-scraping the public index pages?

Tom

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[Abayomi Oloko]

I think it’s premature to posit that Groups isn’t going to die. To be honest, I have been thinking along the line of your original post and wondering what would happen should Google adopt a policy change towards groups. Moreover, one cannot be certain that Groups will be perpetual. I will advise we stay on the course of a plan B just in case.

Sent from my iPhone

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[Alex Krupp]

If someone has all of the email messages going back to the beginning of the group in a Gmail account, it would be very easy to export them that way and then either re-host them elsewhere on the web or else put them into a long term preservation format so that people can download them and use them locally. Here is a good report on the current state of email archiving, in terms of options for preserving them for local use: https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub175/

In terms of re-hosting them, my software (www.fwdeveryone.com) could process all of the raw email messages to make them suitable for display on the web, and then they could be re-hosted wherever. They come out looking like this by default, but the API response serving the processed threads is the main thing of value, using that the actual display can be re-styled to look like whatever. (If you don't get what I mean by processing, compare the API response for that thread with what you see when you do "show original" in Gmail.)

Alex

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