should we continue to use hypermail? · Issue #8 · w3c/mailing-list-archives (original) (raw)

W3C has been using hypermail to generate its mailing list archives for the past 20 years or so. It generally works well but has a few drawbacks:

• no way to view an entire thread on a single page.
• message threads are broken at time-based boundaries (e.g. monthly or quarterly)
• no active user/developer community

However, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of software we could use to replace hypermail. Hyperkitty is the only option I have seen that looks viable, but switching archive systems would be fairly disruptive to our user community, and hyperkitty likely has its own set of drawbacks that we don't know about.

So I think we should plan to continue using hypermail for the forseeable future, and try to improve some of its thread navigation features using external code.

But I wanted to open this as an issue in case others want to propose we switch to something else, and to have a place to discuss possible alternatives.