git-mentoring Google group replacement?

git-mentoring Google group replacement?

[Emily Shaffer]

Hi all,

For a few years we've had this git-mentoring@googlegroups.com list,
with the intention to give new or aspiring contributors a lower-stress
place to ask for guidance when they're just getting started in the
project.

The list has very very low activity. I think we get a newbie asking
for help once or twice a year, and they do get responses right away as
far as I can see; but we much more often get spam, spam, and more
spam. We also tend to get spurious content violation reporting - from
bots I guess, or maybe trolls - and these lead to legitimate
conversations being deleted from the archive. This happened a couple
weeks ago and we lost all conversations but 2. There doesn't appear to
be any way in Google Groups to appeal these decisions - the
notification email that was sent to the list owners simply suggests
that we...get a lawyer?[1] We had a similar takedown last year or so,
and I tried to escalate using Google's internal ticketing for
employees, and didn't get very far there either.

Because it's not possible for us to push back on these takedowns, I
think it's time for us to seek an alternative and shut down the Google
Groups list.

Dscho proposed shutting down the Google Groups and having people ask
in the Discord chat instead. I think it's reasonable; we've had a few
newbies asking for contribution advice there and they get answers just
as quickly, and we get a bit more moderation control. Discord is still
not scrapable by web crawlers (which is one thing that was appealing
to us about a closed Google Group). It does require account creation
to post, but of course we still have git@vger, which does not; this
mentoring-specific channel/list is supposed to just be an alternative
for the especially shy.

Thoughts? Alternate suggestions? I'd also be happy to host a list with
some other service, but I don't have any personal experience on which
services are good to use or not.

 - Emily

1: Here's a sample of the takedown message from Feb 16, 2025; because
the content was down, the link helpfully does not point to any actual
content. I have no idea which mail was actually taken down, because
there's not a good way to translate from Groups URL to Message-Id as
far as I can tell.

Hello emilyshaffer@google.com,

We're letting you know that we've permanently removed the content at
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/git-mentoring/mPiraiIITXI/cdsNx2elAgAJ

Why did this happen?

An external report flagged the content for illegal content or policy
violations. As a result, our legal content and policy standards team
removed the content for the following reason: unwanted content.

Learn more

You can learn more about our content policies and enforcement at our
help center.

What you can do next

You may have the option to pursue your claims in court. If you have
legal questions or wish to examine legal options that may be available
to you, you may want to consult with your own legal counsel.

Re: git-mentoring Google group replacement?

[Junio C Hamano]

Emily Shaffer <nasamuffin@google.com> writes:

> Thoughts? Alternate suggestions? I'd also be happy to host a list with
> some other service, but I don't have any personal experience on which
> services are good to use or not.

I am perfectly fine to close the unusable list, and suggest folks to
redirect to discord or other services.  If the discord channel is
already found to be useful by those new folks who have been helped
there, that would be excellent, and then the question would become

 - what other avenues to ask for help, other than this list, are
   there that community members are willing to support by visiting
   there frequently and help out?  can we compile a list?  I am
   perfectly fine we start with a list with one entry in it.

 - where do we want to advertise such a list?
   Documentation/Contributing?  todo:MaintNotes (aka "A note from
   the Maintainer")?

 - how would we maintain such a list to keep it up-to-date?

Re: git-mentoring Google group replacement?

[Christian Couder]

Hi Emily,

On Fri, Feb 28, 2025 at 11:43 PM 'Emily Shaffer' via git-mentoring
<git-mentoring@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> Because it's not possible for us to push back on these takedowns, I
> think it's time for us to seek an alternative and shut down the Google
> Groups list.
>
> Dscho proposed shutting down the Google Groups and having people ask
> in the Discord chat instead. I think it's reasonable; we've had a few
> newbies asking for contribution advice there and they get answers just
> as quickly, and we get a bit more moderation control. Discord is still
> not scrapable by web crawlers (which is one thing that was appealing
> to us about a closed Google Group). It does require account creation
> to post, but of course we still have git@vger, which does not; this
> mentoring-specific channel/list is supposed to just be an alternative
> for the especially shy.
>
> Thoughts? Alternate suggestions? I'd also be happy to host a list with
> some other service, but I don't have any personal experience on which
> services are good to use or not.

I agree with shutting down the Google Groups and suggesting people ask
on either Discord chat or the #git-devel IRC Channel or the Git
mailing list.

Thanks.