Log bisq-network GitHub organization notifications to [email protected]

[cbeams]

This issue is being written after the fact of some changes that @Emzy and I made over the last few days, in order to document them.

Starting with the Slack conversation at https://bisq.slack.com/archives/C7P9HQC56/p1523871014000357, we decided to create a new mailing list at https://lists.bisq.network/listinfo/github, which anyone can subscribe to, but only [email protected] can post to.

I created a new GitHub service account called @bisq-kitty, whose email address is the email address of the list: [email protected].

And, while logged in as @bisq-kitty, I've clicked "Watch" on all repositories under the @bisq-network organization.

The result is a single mailing list that captures all activity in our @bisq-network GitHub repositories.

This has a few benefits:

1. It's a kind of lightweight backup, if for some reason our GitHub organization were ever suspended. The repositories are already decentralized with enough copies to reconstitute everything, but in such a scenario, all record of our issues and pull requests would be gone. This mailing list would retain those conversations, comments, etc, which could be quite valuable. One day we can perhaps have a complete live backup into GitLab or elsewhere, but in the meantime, this is cheap insurance.

2. It's an excellent way for new contributors (and old for that matter) to see where the action is in Bisq-land. By simply browsing through the list archives, one can see which repositories / projects have the most activity, etc.

3. It gives Bisq users without a GitHub account (who don't want one, or don't want to set one up for privacy reasons) a way of following all @bisq-network GitHub activity via a normal mailing list. They can filter that mailing list based on [...] repository prefixes to see just the notifications they care about.

With less than a day of activity coming into the mailing list, it's already quite interesting to see the effect this approach has:

Note that we killed the [github] mailing list prefix that you see in the first dozen or so entries, because it was just noise. As you can see in the last set of entries, everything is categorized with [bisq-network/<repository>] prefixes, and threading works just as you'd expect.

[cbeams]

Closing as complete, and mentioning @bisq-network/contributors so that everyone is aware of this change. See the issue description above if you missed it.

[cbeams]

Note that I announced / promoted this work via Twitter at https://twitter.com/bisq_network/status/990226645956079616: