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Consider creating a read-only mailing list for announcements
Description
Currently announcements are distributed via issues in the announcements repository. This has the downside that anyone can open issues there, not just the .NET team. On a regular basis someone will create an unrelated issue (e.g. https://github.com/dotnet/announcements/issues/238), which then gets sent to everyone subscribed to the repository, for no benefit.
Consider distributing announcements via a better, read-only, channel instead. Options include a mailing list or a RSS feed.
For backwards compatibility, a bot can sync announcements from there to the announcements repository.
Configuration
Regression?
Other information
@danmoseley, @terrajobst and I had an email thread ~2022/4/24 about how to improve this--there are another few alternatives that would maybe let .NET still use dotnet/announcements.
One is adding a .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/config.yml that doesn't actually include a way to file an issue, just redirects to other repos. Users could still file issues, but they would need to find the issue-filing URL manually because GitHub wouldn't show a button they could click to take them there. So far, the repo hasn't had a problem with malicious issues/comments, just unknowing issues/comments, so I think this would end up ok.
Another is using the "temporary interaction limits" to make sure nobody files issues or comments. We actually enabled it at the time, but as the name says, they're only temporary, and they've expired. Making it someone team's job to refresh the limits (or find a way to configure it using a bot?) could make this work out.
Of course, GitHub isn't designed to be used for this purpose, so going for something else entirely makes a lot of sense. 😄
What about the Wiki feature of the Announcements repository? That can be locked down to just contributors having edit access and we can get a little more search indexing capabilities from our friends at Bing and Google.
It appears that GitHub repositories are not designed for making announcements, yet the potential solutions seem restricted to using one for that purpose. Is that the case? If so, why is that?
Speaking for myself, I don't mean to restrict the potential solutions. The original post already suggests mailing lists and RSS feeds and I don't personally see a problem with either one. I'm just mentioning a few ideas from a while back that address this line of the original post (the motivation for switching):
This has the downside that anyone can open issues there, not just the .NET team.
@terrajobst @richlander @jamshedd any action needed or planned for this issue?
Playing the data controller or data processor role with PII such as email addresses involves more policy and process overhead than one might imagine. I would not favor that approach, instead I'd explorer cheaper ways to lock down the creation of issues in announcements if there's a way to do that. The 2 workarounds @dagood suggested above might work.
We discussed the use of email lists at the beginning of the .NET Core project. After a few back and forths we decided against that. I don't think we'll ever want to start using them again. Markdown on GitHub gives us a lot more flexibility than email. You can easily link to it, you can edit it to improve clarity, and there is an obvious place to point people for a public conversation. I'm very much opposed to going down that path of mailing lists again.
The announcement pattern has worked reasonably well for us, modulo the issue that sometimes people open new issues. I say sometimes, because we basically have a continuous restriction that disallows non-contributors from opening issues (it's a GitHub feature, but we need to renew it every 6 months). We have given the feedback to GitHub. There are several ways this could be achieved here (allowing permanently disabling issues or pure announcement issues + notifications). If something better is available, I'm all for it. But it's for sure not a mailing list.
I'm closing this issue as not planned because it's specifically asking about a mailing list and partially because I think the ability of others to open issues isn't that big of a problem compared to the downsides of mailing lists. But if people disagree and want to discuss alternatives, we can reframe this issue and reopen it again.
Update: we added a bit of automation that permanently disallows folks from opening issues in the dotnet/announcements. It still relies on the GitHub moderation settings, but it simply keeps renewing it.
If you try to open an issue, it looks as follows:
