Consider a Mailing List for this project

[karianna]

In a recent discussion at #136 - I noticed that unless you're deeply following all issues raised in this repo that you can easily miss an important discussion. I'd like to see if we can offer a more inclusive option.

[brunoborges]

Issues can be followed, and replied to, by email. IMO having a mailing list would only fragment further discussions.

[karianna]

The challenge is we can't broadcast to our community and know we've got them registered and listening...

[karianna]

In a meeting today we looked at how GitHub subscribes to your issues, notifications, etc when you Star a project. As it turns out it sets your Watching settings to "Participating and Mentions" which means even folks who were excited about this project do miss out on issues/discussions that they aren't directly participating in. Our conclusion was that a Mailing List would still be preferable, especially for heavy-weight discussions.

[karianna]

It will be interesting to create an Issue or Discussion to see how many folks are 'watching' - and add a poll to see what comms channel. We can also investigate if we can contact everyone who starred the project via the GH API.

[brunoborges]

/relevance-check

[github-actions]

Relevance Assessment: Likely Outdated

• Summary: This 4+ year old request for a mailing list has seen no actionable progress since October 2021, and the project has since adopted GitHub Discussions which partially addresses the original concern about inclusive communication.

• Evidence:

  • Issue opened Oct 15, 2021 — last substantive discussion was Oct 25, 2021 (over 4 years ago).
  • The proposed next steps (creating a poll to gauge community interest, investigating GitHub API to contact starred users) were never followed through.
  • GitHub Discussions is now enabled for this repository (has_discussions: true), which provides broadcast-style, threaded community conversations — addressing the core concern about missing important discussions when only "Participating and Mentions" notifications are active.
  • The project's SUPPORT.md already provides a direct email contact (gctoolkit@microsoft.com) for help and questions.
  • No mailing list was ever created, and the project has continued to operate via GitHub Issues and now Discussions without one.
  • The referenced PR Allow Multi-release to leverage Java 17 (11 minimum) #136 that sparked this discussion was closed back in November 2021.

• Recommendation: 🗄️ Consider closing — The original concern about community members missing important discussions has been substantially addressed by the enablement of GitHub Discussions, which allows for broader, broadcast-style conversations that don't require direct participation to follow. Combined with the existing email contact in SUPPORT.md, the project now has multiple communication channels. This issue has seen no community demand or progress in over 4 years, suggesting a mailing list is no longer a priority.

Generated by Relevance Check Agent for issue #142

[brunoborges]

@karianna my suggestion is to follow the guidance here and close this issue as Not Planned.

[karianna]

Most users will be notified through something like dependenabot, closing this issue.